Real space travel news this week: on September 5, SpaceX launched its 80th Starlink mission of 2026, sending another batch of satellites up from Vandenberg on a Falcon 9 whose booster, B1088, was flying for the 19th time. Nineteen trips to space and back for the same chunk of metal. Meanwhile our own “fleet” here at Online Space Tickets has flown zero times, because it does not exist, because we sell space tickets to flights that are not real. We are very consistent about that part, at least.
The bigger picture is what makes this actual news and not just a satellite-counting exercise: SpaceX is on pace for roughly 155 Falcon 9 missions this year, and Falcon 9’s booster reuse rate is now above 95%. Landing and reflying rockets used to be the wild new idea; now it is Tuesday. Boosters are treated less like disposable rocket stages and more like rental cars that just happen to occasionally go to orbit and come back to be reused again next week.
Here is the part that stings a little for a fake booking site: all that reliability is driving the actual cost of getting mass to orbit down, which is slowly making real space tourism slightly less absurd as a concept. It has not, however, made it easy to buy a seat. Your only current bookable human option is an Axiom flight to the ISS for around $55 million, and Virgin Galactic’s next paying customers are not flying until February 2027 at the earliest. So the rockets got dependable. The tickets did not.
We would love to tell you our booking system is 95% reliable too. It is not, mostly because it is not a system, it is a joke, and the seats were never real to begin with. But we appreciate SpaceX doing the actual hard work of making space travel boring in the best possible way. Somebody has to.
Keep looking up. We’ll keep not booking you anything. — The Online Space Tickets desk