B1093

At a Glance

Booster B1093 is an active Falcon 9 Block 5 first stage built by SpaceX. Since its debut on April 7, 2025, carrying Starlink Group 11-11 to orbit, it has flown twelve missions and stuck the landing every single time. That perfect record places it among the reliable workhorses in SpaceX's fleet, a booster that launches, lands, refurbishes, and flies again with the kind of cadence that seemed impossible a decade ago.

Of those dozen flights, only one has been from Vandenberg Space Force Base: the Transporter 16 rideshare mission on March 30, 2026, launched from Space Launch Complex 4E. The rest of B1093's career has unfolded at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it has lofted Starlink satellites and other payloads into low Earth orbit. It remains flight-proven and ready for more missions as SpaceX continues to expand its reusable booster fleet.

The Career of B1093

B1093 entered service in the spring of 2025, part of the Block 5 generation that represents the final major iteration of the Falcon 9 design. Block 5 boosters are built for rapid reusability, with thermal protection upgrades, titanium grid fins, and reinforced landing legs that allow them to fly ten or more times with minimal refurbishment between missions. From the start, B1093 demonstrated the rhythm SpaceX has perfected: launch, separate, flip, boost back, descend, and settle onto the deck of a droneship or the concrete pad at the launch site.

Its first visit to the Central Coast came nearly a year into its career. On March 30, 2026, B1093 lifted off from SLC-4E carrying Transporter 16, one of SpaceX's dedicated smallsat rideshare missions that fly into sun-synchronous orbit. These Transporter flights are Vandenberg regulars, launching southward over the Pacific and deploying dozens of small satellites for universities, startups, and government agencies in a single go. For B1093, it was flight number twelve, a milestone that many early Falcon 9 boosters never reached.

The booster's flight manifest reveals a pattern common among SpaceX's fleet: frequent use on Starlink missions, with occasional rideshare or commercial payloads mixed in. This flexibility is central to the company's reuse model. A booster that proves itself on internal Starlink missions earns trust for customer payloads, and the revenue from those flights funds the next wave of development. B1093 has followed that path, and as of its last flight in March 2026, it remains in active status with no announced retirement.

Vandenberg Missions

Transporter 16 launched on March 30, 2026, from Space Launch Complex 4E, the primary Falcon 9 pad at Vandenberg. The mission carried a mix of small satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a trajectory that requires a southward launch over the Pacific and is one of the main reasons Vandenberg exists as a launch site. B1093 performed flawlessly, delivering the payload and completing its twelfth consecutive successful landing.

Landings and Recovery

Most Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg end with the booster descending onto the deck of a droneship stationed in the Pacific, typically Of Course I Still Love You. The ship positions itself a few hundred miles downrange, and the booster makes a controlled entry through the atmosphere, reignites its engines, and settles onto the platform using its landing legs and grid fins for steering. It is a routine that has become commonplace, but it is no less remarkable for that.

A smaller number of Vandenberg launches attempt return-to-launch-site landings at Landing Zone 4, the concrete pad adjacent to SLC-4E. When a booster comes back to LZ-4, it produces a double sonic boom that rolls across Lompoc, sometimes rattling windows and prompting phone calls to the base. Residents as far north as Santa Maria have reported hearing the thump on clear days. Whether B1093's single Vandenberg flight ended on the droneship or at LZ-4 is not specified in the available records, but either way, it came home intact and ready to fly again.

Still in the Game

B1093 is still active, still flying, still part of the rotation that keeps SpaceX's launch manifest moving. Twelve flights in just under a year is a pace that would have been unthinkable when the Falcon 9 first flew, and it is now standard practice. Whether this booster will return to Vandenberg for another Transporter mission, a government payload, or a polar Starlink launch remains to be seen. But the numbers tell the story: a dozen launches, a dozen landings, and a flight-proven track record that keeps it in the game.