There are a lot of things that SpaceX has done in recent years that are absolutely marvelous. The company has quickly come to dominate the launch services industry with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy partially reusable rockets. In 2020, the company successfully launched a record 26 times, vastly outpacing any other rocket program, including Chinese and Russian ones. Falcon left other American launch programs in the dust long ago.
Equally amazing is SpaceX’s ability to diversify its launch manifest, so that it not only launches lots of civil missions to NASA International Space Station (ISS), but it also launches lots of commercial satellites for companies and military satellites for the Pentagon. I should stress that it has not been easy to make Arianespace nearly a minor player in the commercial launch market and United Launch Services (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) practically a minor player in the US military launch market. But the company managed to do both rather quickly and seemingly without breaking a sweat.
Oh, I would be remiss if I did not highlight SpaceX’s pièce de résistance—its success in launching US astronauts to ISS aboard its Dragon 2 capsules launched by Falcon 9 rockets. This achievement alone would have gotten massive amounts of international recognition last year had it not been sucked away by all this COVID business.