On March 14, there was a very curious space record: five orbital launches in just 12.5 hours. This achievement clearly demonstrates the pace of space development.
The first launch took place on March 14 at 7:03 p.m. EDT from the spaceport at Cape Canaveral. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully sent the Crew-10 mission to the ISS. Its launch will finally bring home astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Wilmes, whose stay in space has been stretched out for nine long months due to problems with the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.
Less than an hour later, an Electron rocket was launched from the spaceport on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. It put into orbit an Earth remote sensing (ERS) satellite built by Japanese company iQPS. Another four hours later, the Long March 2D rocket was launched from China’s Jiuquan Cosmodrome. It put a pair of remote sensing satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket, launched from the spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base, was the next to go into space. As part of the Transporter-13 mission, it launched 74 satellites into space at once.
Finally, another Falcon 9 was launched again from Cape Canaveral. It put a new batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. This launch took place on March 15 at 07:30 a.m. Thanks to it, a new record was set: five orbital launches in just 12 hours and 27 minutes. Previously, mankind had never sent so many rockets into space in such a short time. The previous achievement was five launches in 20 hours and 51 minutes. It was set on December 5, 2024.
The new record is a clear indication of the increasingly rapid pace of global space development. And, it is reasonable to assume that it will be beaten already in the foreseeable future.
