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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. – With Saturday’s launch of a SpaceX rocket, the Space Coast reached a major milestone, with 73 launches this year.

The Falcon Nine carried 22 Starlink satellites into orbit. At Jetty Park, Mary Harris said her son worked for Blue Origin and she never tired of watching the rockets go up.

“I always like to catch the ones at night, because they’re really nice, I like them.”

Saturday’s record-breaking mission capped off a very busy week in space news. The eight-member NASA crew returned to Earth Friday, after a nearly eight-month mission. The SpaceX Dragon capsule crashed into the Gulf of Mexico just before 3:30 a.m. ET. The three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut spent 235 days in space, the longest of any SpaceX human mission.

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“It wasn’t that long ago that we were happy to have 20 launches a year. We’re doing four to five times as many now. It’s almost surreal now,” said Don Platt, associate professor of space systems at Florida Tech.

On Wednesday, SpaceX launched another Falcon Nine mission that put 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. KSC officials said that after some infrastructure improvements, they aim to host five commercial human spaceflight companies on site by next year.

“This is the vision we set out in 2014 with the Kennedy Space Center Master Plan,” said Tom Engler, Kennedy Space Center director of planning and development.

With two months left in the year, many more launches are still expected. Launch 74 is scheduled for Wednesday. Jerry Eller, a Merritt Island resident, said the space industry has the potential to bring more people together.

“Never gets old. They’re always different, of course. We know it makes the world smaller.”

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