Ten years ago, Elon Musk stood on stage at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and unveiled plans for a giant spaceship to carry people to Mars. This past Sept. 28 — a decade and a day later — the descendant of that vehicle reached orbit for the first time, on Starship's 14th-ever test flight.

The designs and hardware evolved greatly over those 10 years. For example, the 2016 design, called the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), employed carbon fiber, but this gave way to the stainless-steel Starship, which SpaceX began testing in 2019 with short hops from its Texas site. Prototypes flew to high altitude and landed, and some exploded, until SN15 stuck a landing in May 2021. That same year, NASA selected Starship as the first astronaut lander for its Artemis lunar missions.

The full Starship stack — a Super Heavy booster with a Ship upper stage on top — first flew in April 2023 and failed within minutes. Three flights followed in less than a year, each reaching space, and each ending with Ship lost on reentry. During a 2024 test flight, SpaceX moved liquid oxygen between two tanks inside one Ship, the closest it has come to the propellant transfer that any mission to the moon or Mars will require. In June of that year, the company brought both stages down in controlled splashdowns, and that October the launch tower's mechanical arms caught a returning Super Heavy booster for the first time.

Progress wasn't linear, however. After a booster catch in January 2025, a string of Ship failures followed, and one upper stage exploded during ground testing that June. A clean flight in August 2025 helped break the streak, and by that October, SpaceX flew the last of the older design. The first Starship V3 launched in May 2026. Another went up in July, and Flight 14 followed on Sept. 28.

'A different beast'

"ITS was definitely a different beast," said Matija Renčelj of the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI). "Yet, we have to acknowledge two trends that both attest to SpaceX's agility and increasingly market-first rather than vision-first outlook."

"The gap between ITS and Starship is real, but I would not consider that a failure," he said.

In his view, the rocket is mainly a business tool. "The rocket is the means, not the end," Renčelj said, adding that its main role now is cutting Starlink deployment costs. SpaceX currently operates a constellation of more than 11,000 Starlink broadband satellites, almost all of which were launched by its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. But Starship Flight 14 lofted the first members of the next-gen Starlink V3 constellation, which will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan. Starlink V3 satellites are bigger and heavier than their predecessors and can only be launched efficiently by Starship.

Renčelj said the moon focus reflects Washington's priorities and SpaceX's interest in staying central to NASA's Artemis program, and in reassuring investors after the company's acquisition of xAI this past February and its IPO, which occurred in June.

Joseph Gonzalez, a University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering aerospace professor who spent about a decade working on Artemis, sees it differently.

"I think SpaceX is still very much targeting Mars," he said. "SpaceX continues to stress making humanity multiplanetary and establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars as long-term objectives." Gonzalez sees the moon as a proving ground rather than a replacement. Just days away from Earth, the moon lets engineers find problems "before committing humans to a Mars mission."

"Space exploration takes time, especially when you are developing a human spaceflight system with this level of complexity," Gonzalez said. "They build, fly, learn, make changes and fly again. That creates very visible successes and failures, but it also allows engineers to accumulate flight experience and data quickly."

Challenges remain

Reaching Earth orbit isn't the hard part for Starship. Gonzalez said that the most underrated gap is the large-scale cryogenic propellant transfer between vehicles once in orbit. SpaceX has moved propellant between tanks in one Ship before, but its architecture requires numerous transfers involving tanker ships to refill a fuel depot, which a Ship must visit in order to make journeys to the moon or Mars. Gonzalez described this depot as a gas station in space, but there are challenges typical gas stations don't face. The fuel is extremely cold, for example, and it needs to be moved in microgravity conditions.

That milestone is yet to happen, and the timeline for an attempt is not clear. It could potentially come with Flight 15 and 16. These were aspirationally scheduled for no earlier than mid and late October, respectively, but have now apparently slipped to mid-to-late November (though there has been no public confirmation of any firm target date).

In 2025, Musk said there was a "50/50" chance of Starship making a run for Mars in 2026. However, with the once-every-26-months Mars launch window — which lasts a few weeks, opening in late October — and no propellant transfer demonstration yet in the books, that is off the table. The next such low-energy orbital transfer opportunity for the Red Planet opens in late 2028, running into early 2029. At the same time, NASA is currently targeting late 2028 for its Artemis IV mission — which involves Starship — to return humans to the lunar surface after an absence of more than 50 years, giving SpaceX a challenging deadline toward which to work. The company will need to dedicate key resources to meet that timeline, including developing life support systems for crew.

For now, Starship's most immediate role is hauling Starlink satellites in orbit. Renčelj noted that startups raising billions are betting on Starship delivering low super-launch prices along with Falcon 9-like reliability. "Their business models are underpinned by what might be a single point of failure," he said.

"Starship still has major capabilities to demonstrate before it can perform the complete missions envisioned for the moon and Mars," said Gonzalez.

"So I would say the timelines are comparable considering the ambition of the vehicles," he added. "The bigger difference isn't necessarily how many years they have taken, but it's where and how each program chooses to learn during those years."

Musk has repeatedly talked of getting thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people on Mars "to make life multiplanetary." Most immediately, SpaceX has a number of business goals and lunar commitments to adhere to ahead of a first uncrewed visit to Mars. Late 2028 appears to be the next real opportunity.

Did you see a gigantic, glowing jellyfish in the night sky early on Tuesday morning (Oct. 13)? If so, it's not an alien invasion (sorry); it was SpaceX launching its latest mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

What is it?

Just before dawn on Tuesday (Oct. 13), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying to space a robotic Dragon capsule filled with thousands of pounds of cargo.

The liftoff kicked off CRS-35, the 35th mission that SpaceX is flying to the ISS as part of the company's Commercial Resupply Services agreement with NASA. Under the CRS contract, SpaceX has been sending cargo including medical supplies, food, clothing, scientific experiments and more to the space station.

It will take Dragon a couple of days to reach the orbiting lab. If all goes to plan, the capsule will autonomously dock with the ISS' Harmony module around 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on Thursday (Oct. 15).

Why is it incredible?

Imagine you wake up early in the morning. Perhaps you're rushing to get ready for work, or maybe you're just having a quiet moment with your coffee in the pre-dawn twilight. Then imagine you look out the window and see what looks like a gigantic, glowing jellyfish made up of orange and blue light and gas stretching across much of the slowly brightening sky.

If you're not expecting such a sight, or it's your first time seeing the remnants of a rocket launch, this would probably catch you off-guard. But don't worry; there isn't anything dangerous about this sight.

This "jellyfish" is created by the water vapor and carbon dioxide that are expelled by the rocket after takeoff. In the cold upper skies, those gases start to freeze into ice crystals, flowing off of and behind the rocket. If a launch occurs around dusk or dawn, sunlight hits this flowing plume of frozen gases while the ground and skies remain mostly dark, resulting in a uniquely spectacular (albeit, unusual) view.

Nearly three months after surviving its launch to space and a tumultuous trial at sea, the first Starship spacecraft to survive its ocean splashdown has returned to Starbase.

SpaceX shared new photos and video of Ship 40, the Starship upper stage that launched on the developing vehicle's 13th flight test, as it completed the final stretch of its journey back to the company's South Texas facility. Now, the towering spacecraft is upright inside Starbase's Megabay hangar alongside a trio of its successor spacecraft, themselves bound for space, but not before an evaluation of Ship 40 can lend SpaceX engineers some valuable insights.

Ship 40 is the first Starship upper stage to return to its launch site after flying in space, offering SpaceX engineers an unprecedented opportunity to study hardware that survived the intense conditions of atmospheric reentry. "It will provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more," SpaceX wrote in a post on X Oct. 13.

The spacecraft launched atop SpaceX's Super Heavy Booster 20 on July 24, and completed a suborbital flight that ended with a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Unlike previous Ship splashdowns, though, which have exploded after tipping over into the water, Ship 40 remained largely intact and afloat.

That unexpected survival prompted SpaceX to engage in an ambitious recovery effort that included towing the 171-foot (52 meter) stage though rough seas over the course of 24 days. At the time, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk expressed doubts that the company's recovery efforts would be successful. Despite the challenging conditions, Ship arrived off the shores of Australia's Christmas Island in August.

Once in the calmer Christmas waters, SpaceX engineers took time to perform a vehicle inspection and collect a number of heat shield samples from the spacecraft's belly. From there, Ship 40 was loaded onto "Forte," a massive, semi-submersible transport ship for the long seaward journey back to Texas.

Forte arrived at the Port of Brownsville on Oct. 7, wrapping up the longest stretch of Ship 40's return nearly two months after its liftoff. The spacecraft was subsequently transported over land back to Starbase and positioned for reorientation outside the Megabay. It has since been lifted to a vertical position and moved inside the bay alongside three other Ship upper stages still under assembly.

While SpaceX has successfully recovered a trio of Super Heavy boosters using the mechanical arms of its Starbase launch tower, the company has yet to return a Starship upper stage to its launch site under its own power. The return of Ship 40 will give SpaceX engineers the opportunity to study the vehicle from top to bottom as they fine-tune the systems needed to do just that. Its return marks a milestone in SpaceX's efforts to develop Starship as a rapidly reusable launch vehicle, with lessons from the recovered spacecraft potentially informing future vehicle designs and recovery operations.

Ship 40's immediate successor, Ship 41, launched on Flight 14 before 40's return to Starbase. Although 41 didn't survive its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the mission marked Starship's first orbital flight, and included the successful deployment of 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.

Musk has said Starship's next launch, Flight 15, could feature the first attempt to catch the Ship upper stage using the same chopstick-like arms on the vehicle's launch tower, provided the spacecraft meets the necessary conditions for a safe return. SpaceX has not announced an official launch date for Starship's next flight, but, based on the testing progress of the Ship and Super Heavy in line for the mission, it is likely to fly within the next month or so.

That wasn't the case Tuesday morning (Oct. 13), when SpaceX launched the CRS-35 mission for NASA. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:35 a.m. EDT (1035 GMT), carrying a cargo variant of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft on the company's 35th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Following the northward path of the space station's orbit at the time, the rocket flew a trajectory along the United States' East Coast.

Falcon 9's expanding engine plume grew substantially wider than the rocket itself as it climbed in altitude into thinner, less dense air, and was illuminated by the early dawn light, making the sight visible to millions. "You can imagine my surprise when I opened my back door to let the dogs out this morning," Ellen Alence told Space.com. She snapped a pic of the rocket from her farm Colbert, Georgia.

"Many of you are talking about the 'space jellyfish' following this morning's launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida," NASA's Kennedy Space Center wrote in a post on X. The post explains the "jellyfish" phenomenon that is sometimes visible during dawn and dusk launches, and included additional photos of the launch.

"A jellyfish happens near sunrise or sunset when the exhaust plume from the rocket becomes brightly illuminated, creating a glowing shape resembling a jellyfish," the post said.

Further up the coast, Richard Mack Wilson-Leigh spotted the flight from Durham, North Carolina. His view of the rocket came just seconds before the vehicle's stage separation, which was followed immediately by the rocket's main booster performing an engine burn to right its trajectory for landing back at the Cape. Wilson-Leigh said that part caught him off guard more than the initial site of the rocket. "I thought it blew up at first," he jokingly told Space.com.

"At first, I thought it was a comet," Wilson-Leigh said. "My mind jumped between two thoughts: that is just beautiful beyond belief, and it is the end of the world.”

That stage separation came about 2.5 minutes after liftoff, and put on a dazzling display for those awake to see it this morning. As Falcon 9's booster began the journey to its landing zone, the rocket's second stage continued onward to orbit with Dragon and the capsule's 6,300 pounds (2,860 kilograms) of cargo for the ISS.

The spacecraft will spend roughly two days catching up to the ISS, where a recent personnel rotation swapped the astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission with those of Crew-13. The latter arrived aboard the orbital laboratory Oct. 1, which was followed several days later by the return of Crew-12 to Earth on Oct. 8.

The Dragon carrying the contents of CRS-35's manifest will arrive at the station Thursday morning (Oct. 15), and will autonomously dock to the space-facing port of the Harmony module at around 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT). Coverage of the arrival here at Space.com beginning at 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT).

The Los Angeles-area startup, which bills itself as one of just two companies that can currently do commercial reentry from space, successfully launched its latest two refrigerator-sized spacecraft aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission on Oct. 1.

"It's humanity's first time launching multiple commercial reentry vehicles simultaneously," Varda CEO Will Bruey told Space.com on Tuesday (Oct. 7) of the Transporter-18 launch.

The payloads on the Transporter-18 Varda craft ranged from pharmaceuticals to demo navigation systems to exterior thermal-protection materials. The company bills its spacecraft as mini-factories, which can host the orbital production of valuable goods such as pharmaceuticals and then bring them safely down to Earth.

Another Varda vehicle is scheduled to follow them into space later this month. Assuming the third spacecraft launches nominally, all three will come down before Christmas in the Koonibba Test Range in the South Australian Outback, through coordination with Varda's long-time space-mission service provider, Southern Launch. And things are scheduled to ramp up quickly: Varda aims to fly seven more missions in 2027: two in Quarter 1 (Q1), two in Q2 and three in Q3 (the latter three being all on the same rocket).

"As we scale up, we care about our ability to fly and fly regularly," Bruey said, emphasizing that the company is now treating its missions less as one-offs and more as a series. "It is, first and foremost, taking that unique [spacecraft] technology and moving into a fleet mentality, rather than a space mission mentality."

Like any startup finding its footing, Varda's challenges in the coming months will be scaling safely and efficiently. But the company says it is well-capitalized to do so, and has a big hiring campaign underway. It also has been spending money on slight upgrades and improvements to its vehicles, as well as mission operations and other infrastructure to run several missions at the same time, with more funds having just arrived.

In September, Varda announced it had raised $251 million in "Series D" investment funding and will be hiring 100 people by the end of 2027, boosting its current 286-employee base by more than a third. Most of the employees work out of El Segundo, California, with a few in sales offices in Washington, D.C. and Huntsville, Alabama (where U.S. Space Command is gradually moving, along with some defense contractors, from Colorado Springs).

In the further future, Bruey said, the goal is to fly Varda vehicles into space daily, using a "standardized product" that would be put together on an assembly line. But to get to that point, like other companies in the industry, Varda will need to get through an anticipated rocket shortage beginning in about 2029.

SpaceX is by far the most active launcher these days, and it has been the dominant provider for companies like Varda via its Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare programs. But SpaceX is readying to retire its Falcon 9 rocket as it transitions more resources into Starship, the fully reusable megarocket the company sees as its workhorse of the future. Media reports suggest that SpaceX is pretty much out of capacity for Falcon 9 rockets flying through the end of service in 2028 or 2029, although slots are still available through third-party bookers.

There are a slew of newer rockets under production (such as Blue Origin's New Glenn and Relativity Space's Terran R), though they are far less mature and in some cases, even unflown. This is creating uncertainty about how much capacity there will be in the industry in the short term, but Varda said it is planning well ahead for that moment — and so too are its customers.

"We're stacked with launches from now through that 2029 time frame," Bruey said. The company's current generation of vehicles is "launch-agnostic," although the next generation is aiming to be even more so to nab opportunities from small rockets up to Starship.

The company said that, as long as Varda and its customers have access to microgravity, the shipping methodology — much like shipping on Earth — should not matter, and Varda aims to make the experience that seamless for its customers. But in the meantime, the company says it will fly as much as possible and (like everyone else) do what it can to secure slots on launching rockets after Falcon 9 retires.

SpaceX just broke an uncharacteristically long Starlink launch drought.

The company sent 27 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) today (Oct. 12), launching them atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 8:28 p.m. EDT (5:28 p.m. local time; 0028 GMT on Oct. 13)

It was the first Starlink mission for a Falcon 9 since Sept. 19, which was another 27-satellite liftoff from Vandenberg. For some perspective on this recent gap: Between Aug. 19 and Sept. 6, a span of 19 days, SpaceX launched seven Starlink missions with Falcon 9s.

SpaceX did loft a batch of Starlinks after that, but it wasn't aboard a Falcon 9. The company's Starship megarocket carried 26 next-gen Starlink V3 craft on its 14th test flight, which took place on Sept. 28.

Starship reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14, and it deployed the Starlinks successfully as well. This will happen many more times going forward, if all goes to plan: The Starlink V3 constellation will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, all of which will fly on Starship, Elon Musk has said.

Indeed, SpaceX plans to sunset the Falcon 9 and its cousin, the Falcon Heavy, in the next few years, shifting their duties over to the fully reusable, far more powerful Starship, which remains in the test-flight phase.

That shift will be a big one for the spaceflight community, for the Falcon 9 is the workhorse rocket of its generation. In 2025, for example, it flew 165 times — roughly the same number as the rest of the world's orbital launchers combined. Nearly three-quarters of those Falcon 9 launches were Starlink missions.

Things have slowed down a bit in 2026. Today's flight was the 112th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, and the 82nd in service of the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 11,100 active satellites.

All went according to plan on today's launch. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, touching down about 8.5 minutes after launch on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 20th launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated B1088.

The rocket's expendable upper stage, meanwhile, delivered the 27 spacecraft to LEO, deploying them there 62 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced via X.

SpaceX launched its latest cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday morning (Oct. 13).

A Falcon 9 rocket launched a robotic Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday at 6:35 a.m. EDT (1035 GMT).

The launch kicks off the CRS-35 mission, so named because it will be the 35th that SpaceX flies under a Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA.

If all goes according to plan, Dragon will reach the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday (Oct. 15), docking autonomously to the space-facing port of its Harmony module at around 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT). You can watch the arrival here at Space.com as well; coverage will start at 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT).

CRS-35 will deliver 6,300 pounds (2,860 kilograms) of supplies to the astronauts aboard the orbiting lab, including the final set of International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs), which will boost the orbiting lab's energy budget.

There's also quite a bit of scientific gear heading up on the flight.

Dragon "will deliver hardware to manufacture artificial retinas in microgravity to help restore vision on Earth and 3D heart tissue models to advance large‑scale drug testing on future missions," NASA officials wrote in a CRS-35 launch preview on Oct. 7.

"The spacecraft will carry materials to study how a new type of glass forms in microgravity and brain organoids that could reveal treatment targets for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis," they added.

Dragon will stay attached to the ISS for about a month, then head back down to Earth with scientific experiments and other hardware. It will splash down safely under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

SpaceX's Dragon is the only currently operational freighter that can carry cargo in the downward direction. The other three — Russia's Progress, Japan's HTV-X and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL — are all expendable, burning up in Earth's atmosphere after their time at the ISS is done.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6:59 a.m. EDT on Oct. 13 with news of a successful launch.

SpaceX just sent another batch of satellites to orbit for the U.S. military.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Oct. 10) at 3:39 a.m. EDT (0739 GMT; 12:39 a.m. local time), hauling 21 "data transport" satellites to orbit for the U.S. Space Force's Space Development Agency (SDA).

That was five days later than originally planned. SpaceX tried to launch the mission on Monday (Oct. 5), but the Falcon 9 aborted that attempt in the countdown's final minute, for reasons that the company has not disclosed.

Today's launch helps build out the SDA's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), which SpaceX describes as "a mesh network of optically connected satellites in low Earth orbit [LEO] that enable global military tactical communications and missile warning, indication and tracking capabilities."

The liftoff was the fourth of nine that SpaceX will conduct to help assemble the architecture's Tranche 1 — the "initial warfighting capability tranche," according to the SDA.

Tranche 1 will eventually consist of 154 operational satellites in LEO — 126 data-transport spacecraft and 28 missile-tracking vehicles. There will also be four missile-defense test satellites, which will sport a "higher fidelity" infrared sensor than their tracking counterparts, SDA officials wrote. (Missile-tracking satellites generally hunt for the heat signatures these weapons produce during flight).

Eighty-four of the 126 data-transport satellites have now launched to date, all of them on Falcon 9s, which lifted off from Vandenberg in September 2025, October 2025, July of this year and today.

And, as its name suggests, Tranche 1 will be just the beginning, if all goes according to plan.

"SDA leverages spiral development to deploy and proliferate new capability into a new generation of the PWSA every two years, called a 'tranche,' to continually increase capability used by the warfighter," SDA officials wrote in a Tranche 1 fact sheet.

Everything seemed to go well on today's launch. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Vandenberg for a landing a little over seven minutes after liftoff. It was the sixth mission for this particular booster, which is designated 1103. Its most recent flight was the July Tranche 1 mission for the SDA.

SpaceX ended its webcast shortly after booster touchdown, at the request of the SDA, so we did not get to see satellite deployment. But that's the norm for national security launches.

The satellites were successfully deployed in their target orbit, according to an Oct. 10 announcement by their builder, aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. The 21 spacecraft "will provide secure, resilient, low-latency communications and data transport in low Earth orbit," helping to connect warfighters with missile-tracking satellites, the company wrote.

Today's mission was the 111th Falcon 9 flight of the year. The vast majority of these — more than 70% — have helped build out SpaceX's Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 11,000 satellites.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:45 p.m. ET on Oct. 10 with news of successful satellite deployment.

The great views of Starship's first orbital flight keep on coming.

The megarocket circled our planet for the first time ever on Sept. 28, its 14th liftoff to date. And Starship deployed some payloads when it got up there — 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink satellites, the first members of a broadband constellation that will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

SpaceX already released still imagery of that historic deployment, which was captured by cameras on a few of the Starlink satellites. But on Tuesday, the company gave us something even better, releasing gorgeous video of Starlink craft popping out of the Starship upper stage's "Pez dispenser" slot.

"Constant communication is what makes autonomy like this safe," representatives of Starlink, which is a SpaceX subsidiary, said in a Tuesday X post that featured the deployment video.

"Early contact lets us take maneuvering responsibility, publish ephemeris faster than ground radar can catalog the object, and deorbit and keep commanding through demise if needed," they added. "We treat early communications as a requirement, not a nice-to-have."

A few days earlier, on Oct. 2, SpaceX posted three short videos of another important Flight 14 milestone — stage separation, when the megarocket's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship spacecraft began flying independently of its Super Heavy booster.

The footage captured the farewell from both perspectives. One video showed Super Heavy falling back toward Earth, while the other two revealed Ship powering its way toward orbit, its six Raptor engines glowing yellow-orange with the effort.

Super Heavy came down relatively quickly, steering itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Ship stayed up for another three hours, circling Earth multiple times (and deploying those Starlink satellites) before meeting its own watery end in the northern Pacific Ocean.

Despite Flight 14's successes, Starship remains in the development phase and needs to tick a few other important boxes before it's fully operational.

For example, SpaceX still needs to demonstrate in-space refueling of Ship, which will be necessary on all Starship missions that venture beyond Earth orbit. And crewed versions of the vehicle will need a life-support system, which has yet to fly on any of the test missions to date.

All 14 of the SpaceX megarocket's test flights to date have lifted off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas — including the most recent, on Sept. 28, which saw Starship reach orbit for the first time.

But SpaceX is working hard to get three pads on Florida's Space Coast ready for Starship. And one of them, historic Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), is nearly there, according to the company.

"Things are going super well at 39A," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a briefing on Oct. 1 that primarily discussed that day's launch of the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the International Space Station.

The pad's new Starship launch tower is nearly complete, as is most other essential construction at the site, according to Scheiman.

"We've essentially done a lot of the initial build of the structures and the systems needed for launching Starship, and we're beginning to step into the sort of acceptance testing and operational testing prior to activation," she said. "So, we're kind of through the main construction and going into the proofing, testing — activation testing."

The work at Pad 39A began in late 2021. The fact that it's taken so long shouldn't be surprising, for Starship requires some very specialized infrastructure. After all, it's the biggest rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall. For comparison, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles — the only rockets that have flown out of Pad 39A since SpaceX started leasing it from NASA in 2014 — are both about 230 feet (70 m) tall.

Starship is also designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, and its recovery operations are very different than those of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The first stages of those two rockets touch down either on a ship at sea or on a designated landing pad close to the launch site. But Starship's two stages — its Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to come back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the giant tower's "chopstick" arms. So finishing construction of Pad 39A's new Starship tower will be a very big deal.

Starship also employs different engines than the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy — Raptors rather than Merlins. Raptors burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than rocket-grade kerosene and LOX like Merlins, so the new Starship-friendly 39A needs a new tank farm to feed in this different mix of propellant.

SpaceX plans to launch at least one more Starship test flight from Starbase before flying the megarocket out of KSC, Scheiman said on Oct. 1 — meaning the first Florida Starship launch come come as soon as Flight 16.

The company has not yet announced target dates for upcoming Starship launches, but provisional planning documents identify Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 as possible "no earlier than" dates for Flight 15 and Flight 16, respectively. Those dates may be a bit aspirational, but they suggest that SpaceX aims to fly Starship again soon, and to launch two missions in relatively quick succession. (For perspective: Starship has flown three times so far this year — on May 22, July 24 and Sept. 28.)

Whenever Starship breaks in the new Pad 39A, it will be something of a blast from the past. The launch complex was originally built in the 1960s to host launches of a different megarocket — NASA's Saturn V, which sent the Apollo moon missions skyward. Pad 39A was the jumping-off point for some of the most iconic Apollo flights, including Apollo 8 in December 1968 and Apollo 11 in July 1969.

This tradition will continue, if all goes according to plan: NASA picked Starship's Ship upper stage to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

Ship is scheduled to fly for the Artemis program for the first time on Artemis III, a planned 2027 docking test in Earth orbit between the vehicle and NASA's Orion capsule. And that Ship liftoff will take place from Pad 39A, Scheiman said.

There's more pad work going on in Florida as well. Late last year, the U.S. Air Force gave SpaceX permission to fly Starship from two pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next-door to KSC. Those two pads — SLC (Space Launch Complex)-37A and SLC-37B — could eventually host 76 Starship liftoffs per year between them.

SpaceX has already made considerable progress on SLC-37A and SLC-37B, according to Scheiman. "If you look towards Launch Complex 37, you can see the beginnings of that Starship tower," she said on Oct. 1.

And SpaceX plans to break ground next year on an even bigger Starship launch site — the $100 billion, 12-pad Starbase Louisiana complex. Twelve new pads seems like overkill, unless you know that SpaceX aims to launch more than 10,000 Starship missions per year by 2030.

The vast majority of those liftoffs will serve to assemble two SpaceX megaprojects in Earth orbit: the next-gen Starlink broadband network, which will consist of about 100,000 satellites, and Starmind, an AI data center constellation that will feature a million spacecraft, according to Elon Musk.

The milestone came on Tuesday night (Oct. 6), when the homegrown Nuri rocket lifted off from the nation's Naro Space Center, carrying 15 satellites skyward.

Liftoff occurred at 11:25 p.m. EDT (0325 GMT and 12:25 p.m. local time on Oct. 7). Almost everything went well: All but one of the payloads was successfully delivered to low Earth orbit as planned, according to the state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).

Five of those payloads are microsatellites for South Korea's nascent New-space Earth Observation Satellite Constellation for National Safety (NEONSAT) network.

"Each NEONSAT weighs less than 100 kilograms [220 pounds] and carries an electro-optical camera capable of distinguishing objects as small as 1 meter [3.3 feet] in black-and-white images and 4 meters [13.1 feet] in color images," South Korea's Yonhap news agency wrote in a prelaunch preview.

"The satellites will monitor the Korean Peninsula and surrounding areas for national security and disaster response," Yonhap added.

Two NEONSAT satellites had launched before today, both aboard Rocket Lab Electron vehicles. The first went up in April 2024, and the second flew in January of this year. Five more will launch atop a Nuri next year, rounding out the constellation, according to Yonhap.

The other 10 satellites that went up tonight are cubesats, which were provided by a variety of operators. And it was one of these cubesats that experienced difficulty on Tuesday night: PERSAT02, which was developed by the South Korean company Quaternion, failed to deploy, KARI wrote in an X post about two hours after launch.

The 155-foot-tall (47 meters) Nuri, also known as KSLV-II (Korean Space Launch Vehicle-II), is South Korea's first fully homegrown orbital launcher. It is jointly operated by KARI and the company Hanwha Aerospace.

The three-stage rocket failed during its debut mission in October 2021 but is now riding a streak of four straight successes.

"Through this 5th launch, we have further elevated the Nuri rocket's capability to perform space transportation missions by precisely deploying multiple satellites into orbit in a single launch," KARI wrote in the same X post. "We sincerely thank all citizens for your warm interest and support for the successful flight of the Nuri rocket."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After a more than two-week delay, NASA's next astronaut crew is finally in orbit.

SpaceX launched its Crew-13 astronaut mission for NASA today (Oct. 1) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here on Florida's Space Coast on a flight to the International Space Station (ISS) that will last about 8 hours — the fastest Crew Dragon flight ever to the orbiting lab.

"It was an incredible launch," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a post-launch press conference today. "This is an absolutely great start to Crew 13. We will be watching very closely, cheering them on throughout their great expedition."

Crew-13's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) from Launch Complex-40, carrying the astronaut quartet into low Earth orbit (LEO) aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon "Grace." It's the second launch for Grace, which also ferried the crew of the private Axiom-4 mission to the ISS last summer. It's also the second mission for Crew-13's commander, NASA's Jessica Watkins, who is, coincidentally, the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft for a second time.

Watson is joined by three spaceflight rookies: Crew-13 mission pilot Luke Delaney of NASA and mission specialists Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Their trip to LEO took less than 10 minutes. About 2.5 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9's second stage separated from its booster, known as B1101, and, in short succession, began executing its orbital insertion burn. Meanwhile, B1101 performed a simultaneous boostback burn to reset its trajectory for a return and touchdown at the landing zone adjacent to LC-40. An entry and landing burn followed, with a successful touchdown about 7 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff. This was the third launch and recovery of B1101.

The second-stage engine burn ended about a minute later, wrapping up an orbital insertion maneuver that lasted roughly six minutes. Grace was released another a minute afterward to begin its chase of the ISS.

"Thanks for an amazing ride," Watkins told Mission Control shortly after that milestone was reached.

"They say that courage is grace under pressure, and the incredible teams that got us to orbit today truly embody that," she added. "Thank you for your hard work, perseverance, and courageous commitment to ensuring Grace was ready and safe to fly. We carry with us on this journey all of you who have supported us along the way, and we hope to make you proud."

Crew-13 won't have to wait long to begin rendezvous and docking procedures.

Typical Crew Dragon missions take 15 to 24 hours to catch up to the space station. For comparison, Russian launch profiles deliver the Soyuz crew capsule to the ISS anywhere between three hours to two days after liftoff. Grace will only have about 7 hours, 50 minutes on orbit before docking with the ISS, setting a new speed record for an American spacecraft.

"We got lucky this time," Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and dragon programs at SpaceX, said in the post-launch briefing. "The space station was in an opportune spot in space, and the orbital mechanics, the physics of it all, worked out for it to be the the shortest launch to docking time we've had to date."

The Crew-13 spaceflyers will call the ISS home for roughly six months. During their stint, they will take over ongoing station maintenance and research investigations, many of which focus on astronaut health and the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body. Other experiments on the Crew-13 docket include studies into stem-cell derived tissues to treat Parkinson's and heart disease, as well as the harvesting of produce in zero-g.

The astronauts' time aboard the ISS is expected to wrap up sometime next year, around February or March, when SpaceX launches NASA's Crew-14 astronauts to replace them. Similarly, Crew-13 will relieve the four Crew-12 astronauts. Crew-13's arrival will signal the beginning of departure preparations for the members of Crew-12, who launched to the ISS about 7.5 months ago — a slightly longer stay than originally anticipated.

Crew-12 was expected to return to Earth last month, but a delay in Crew-13 extended their mission by a few weeks. An oxidizer leak in Grace's propulsion system was discovered in August, prompting NASA and SpaceX to allot more time for prelaunch checkouts and tests.

NASA's Crew-13 coverage is scheduled to continue at 5:20 p.m. EDT (2020 GMT), with docking expected around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT). Grace will dock with the forward-facing port on the station's Harmony module, where it will remain for the duration of the Crew-13 mission. Hatch opening is scheduled for 8:25 p.m. EDT (0025 GMT, Oct. 2), with short welcoming remarks by the crews to follow. You can watch all of this action here at Space.com.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 1 with quotes from the post-launch press conference.

SpaceX launched a reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government on Thursday night (Oct. 1), the third liftoff for the company in less than 13 hours.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday at 11:54 p.m. EDT (0354 GMT on Oct. 2), on a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-97.

The launch rounded out a tripleheader for SpaceX, which also sent the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the International Space Station on Thursday morning and lofted the 130-satellite Transporter-18 rideshare flight that afternoon. Both of those earlier missions flew on Falcon 9 rockets.

SpaceX has launched three missions in such a short timeframe just once before — in March 2025, when the company sent up three Falcon 9 rockets in a 12.5-hour span.

The Falcon Heavy consists of three modified, strapped-together first stages of the workhorse Falcon 9. The heavy lifter debuted in February 2018 and now has 14 flights under its belt to date, all of them successful (provided NROL-97 goes to plan).

NROL-97 is the first Falcon Heavy mission for the NRO, which operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites. We don't know much about NROL-97, which isn't surprising; NRO missions tend to be classified. But the fact that a Falcon Heavy was the rocket of choice suggests that the payload(s) that went up on Thursday night are quite heavy, and/or are headed for a relatively distant destination. (SpaceX didn't tell us what orbit the Falcon Heavy targeted.)

The NROL-97 mission patch, for what it's worth, features the phrase "Orbem mundi mutandum conservare," which is Latin for "to preserve a changing world" or "to preserve the world by transforming it." The emblem also memorializes the lives lost during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The lighthouse characterizes enduring strength and the ability to provide information to those in need, even in difficult times," NRO officials wrote in a description of the patch. "The endpoints of the light beam align to the locations of 9 and 11 on a clock face in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Four prominent stars represent the four aircraft lost on 9/11, and the moon phase is shown as it appeared on September 11, 2026."

The launch webcast didn't shed much light on NROL-97. At the request of the NRO, it ended shortly after the Falcon Heavy's two side boosters come back to Earth for a landing, which occurred at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station a little less than eight minutes after liftoff.

NROL-97 was the second and fourth flight for those two boosters, respectively, according to SpaceX's mission page. The Falcon Heavy's central booster was not recovered.

SpaceX also launched the 14th test flight of its next-gen Starship megarocket on Monday (Sept. 28). So all three of the company's currently-flying rockets just lifted off within a three-day span.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:10 a.m. ET on Oct. 2 with news of successful launch and booster landings.

SpaceX launched 130 payloads to orbit today (Oct. 1), including a prototype Google AI satellite, on the second leg of a planned spaceflight tripleheader.

The rideshare mission, called Transporter-18, lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 2:32 p.m. EDT (1832 GMT; 11:32 a.m. local California time), rising through the fog that typically blankets this scenic coastal site.

Everything went according to plan on the flight. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Vandenberg for a landing about 7.5 minutes after liftoff, completing its 25th flight to date. And the rocket's upper stage powered its way to low Earth orbit (LEO), where it deployed the 130 payloads over a roughly 11-minute stretch starting 54.5 minutes after launch.

The highest-profile payload it carried up is a pathfinder spacecraft for Project Suncatcher, the AI constellation that Google plans to build and operate in LEO.

This satellite will help the project team determine how tensor processing units (TPUs) — Google chips that are core Suncatcher hardware — perform in the space environment. Of particular importance are how the TPUs withstand space radiation, and how efficiently the heat they generate is dissipated.

Another company with AI data center ambitions flew on Transporter-18 as well: Cowboy Space put its Reason-1 satellite on the Falcon 9.

"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said of Reason-1 in a Sept. 28 X post. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins."

Transporter-18 also launched Starfish Space's first Otter servicing satellite.

"This is a big moment for Starfish Space," the Washington-based company said via X on Sept. 24. "We've spent years developing, iterating, and proving out the key technologies required for affordable, available satellite servicing. Now we’re launching Otters, putting our satellite servicing vehicles to work for customers in orbit."

The rest of the 130 payloads were a diverse lot, consisting of "cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads and two spacecraft with reentry vehicles and four orbital transfer vehicles carrying 41 of those payloads to be deployed at a later time," SpaceX wrote in its Transporter-18 mission description.

Transporter-18 didn't set a record for most payloads launched at once, but it came close. The current mark is 143, sent on SpaceX's Transporter-1 mission in January 2021.

Transporter-18 was part of a very busy day for SpaceX. The company also launched the Crew-13 astronaut mission for NASA this morning, and it aims to loft the NROL-97 flight for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office late tonight, both of them from Florida's Space Coast. Crew-13 flew on a Falcon 9, and NROL-97 will ride a Falcon Heavy to orbit.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:50 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1 with news of successful launch and rocket landing, then again at 4:35 p.m. EDT with news of payload deployment.

Elon Musk's company is scheduled to launch three missions in a 13-hour span today (Oct. 1), a feat it has accomplished just once before.

The action will start at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) with the launch of the Crew-13 astronaut mission for NASA, which will head toward the International Space Station atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Next up is the Transporter-18 rideshare mission, which will send 130 payloads to orbit, including a prototype satellite for Google's Project Suncatcher AI constellation.

Transporter-18 will fly on a Falcon 9 from the West Coast, lifting off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base during a 58-minute window that opens at 2:18 p.m. EDT (1818 GMT; 11:18 a.m. local California time).

The action shifts back to Florida's Space Coast for the final leg of the tripleheader. If all goes to plan, a Falcon Heavy rocket will launch the classified NROL-97 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office from NASA's Kennedy Space Center tonight at 11:53 p.m. EDT (0353 GMT on Oct. 2).

You can watch all of these launches live. Space.com will stream the Crew-13 launch, courtesy of NASA, and SpaceX will webcast Transporter-18 and NROL-97 on its website.

The only other time that SpaceX has launched three missions in such a short timeframe was March 14-15 of 2025, when three Falcon 9 rockets launched in a 12.5-hour span.

The first two rockets lofted the Crew-10 astronaut mission and the Transporter-13 rideshare flight. The final Falcon 9 sent 23 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit.

Today's missions, by the way, come on the heels of the 14th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket, which saw the vehicle reach Earth orbit for the first time ever. So the company is giving all of its active rockets a workout this week, if current schedules hold.

Crew-13 is scheduled to lift off Thursday (Oct. 1) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex-40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). The mission is targeting an instantaneous launch window at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT), with docking planned for just under eight hours later. You can watch all of the action here at Space.com when the time comes.

And all of the hardware is ready for an on-time launch, we learned today (Sept. 30).

"Right now, everything is 'go,'" Lori Glaze, associate administrator for NASA's Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said during a prelaunch press briefing this evening.

But the weather has to be good as well, she added — and that's not a sure thing. Current forecasts predict a 45% chance of a weather violation, meaning there's a 55% chance the mission will get the green light for liftoff.

When Crew-13 launches, SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule "Grace" will ferry the astronauts to low Earth orbit (LEO), led by commander Jessica Watkins, who is poised to become the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a Crew Dragon for a second time. Her three crewmates, all astronaut rookies, are NASA's Luke Delaney (Crew-13 pilot), Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The latter two serve as mission specialists.

The Crew-13 astronauts will live and work aboard the ISS for roughly six months as part of ISS Expedition 75. During their time on orbit, they will continue regular station upkeep and maintenance and contribute to a range of ongoing research experiments and scientific studies.

Many on-orbit investigations are focused on astronaut health and examining the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, which can have rippling effects for medical innovations back on Earth. Crew-13 will also conduct trials to better understand in-space food production.

"The crew will help researchers treat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem-cell derived tissues that can help improve medicine, disease modeling and pharmaceutical testing," said Dana Weigel, NASA's LEO program manager, in a Sept. 28 NASA statement.

"They also will explore crop production, which is important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, help us better understand blood flow abnormalities that we see in space and test new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health," she added.

Crew-13's arrival at the orbital laboratory will also signal the beginning of the end of the Crew-12 mission. SpaceX launched Crew-12 in February, and those four astronauts have been wrapping up their time on the ISS as their mission has approached its conclusion. They ended up having a couple of extra weeks in space: Crew-13 had been targeted to launch on Sept. 12, but a leak in Grace's propulsion system, discovered during pre-mission checkouts, pushed the launch back. Now, mission managers and officials at NASA and SpaceX have cleared Grace for flight.

If Thursday's launch is scrubbed due to weather or other delays, a backup opportunity exists on Friday (Oct. 2), with a liftoff that day scheduled for 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT).

SpaceX succesfully launched its Crew-13 astronaut crew for NASA today at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026 on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Docking occurred at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), with the crew entering the ISS at 9:43 p.m. EDT (0143 GMT on Oct. 2), about 25 minutes after the hatches opened between the station's Harmony module and their Crew Dragon capsule, "Grace.".

Four Crew-13 astronauts make SpaceX's fastest ever trip the ISS on a Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon, which were docked only eight hours after liftoff. Grace and its crew will remain aboard the ISS for a roughly six-month mission before their return to Earth around February or March 2027.

Rewatch the Crew-13 launch | SpaceX | Falcon 9 | ISS

October 1, 2026 – 11:11 AM

LIFTOFF! SpaceX launches Crew-13 astronauts to ISS

LIFTOFF! SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying four Crew-13 astronauts on the Crew Dragon Grace lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on time at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT).

October 1, 2026 – 12:11 PM

NASA, SpaceX to hold Crew-13 post-launch briefing @ 1:10 pm ET

With the succesful launch of NASA's Crew-13 astronauts on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule, NASA and SpaceX are now preparing to hold a post-launch press briefing. However, the timing has changed. While we wait, check out the amazing Crew-13 launch photos and Falcon 9 landing view from Space.com's Josh Dinner! You can see video of the launch at the top of this page, too.

SpaceX and NASA will now hold the press conference at 1:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT), about 25 minutes later than planned. You'll be able to watch it live here at start time. Here's a look at who will be speaking during the briefing:

We'll be back at 1 p.m. ET for the briefing and thanks for tuning in!

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• Dr. Lori Glaze, associate administrator, Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Dana Weigel, manager, Low Earth Orbit Program, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston
• Mathieu Caron, director, Astronauts, Life Sciences, and Space Medicine, CSA
• Julianna Scheiman, director, NASA Science and Dragon Programs, SpaceX

Update for 11:30 am ET: SpaceX has successfully launched the Crew-13 astronauts to the International Space Station on a Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon Grace. You can see live Crew-13 launch updates here. Read our launch wrap and see awesome Crew-13 video.

SpaceX is just one day way from launching its next astronaut crew to the International Space Station for NASA, and if you're hoping to watch the day-long mission live online, we've got you covered.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch four astronauts to the ISS on the Crew-13 mission as early as Thursday, Oct. 1, from one of the company's pads at Cape Canveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is set for 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT), but that could change due to weather or technical glitches. You'll be able to watch it all live on this page and our YouTube channel at launch time.

The SpaceX Crew-13 mission will launch NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney and crewmates Joshua Kutryk (of Canada) and cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov to the ISS for a six-month stay. They will join three other crewmates as part of the Expedition 75 crew. Here's a look at when and how to tune in.

What time will SpaceX launch Crew-13?

SpaceX and NASA currently plan to launch the Crew-13 astronaut mission to the ISS on Thursday, Oct. 1, at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) from SpaceX's pad at Space Launch Complex 40 of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

That launch time could change if SpaceX has to delay a day or two due to weather. (There is currently a 60% chance of favorable conditions for liftoff on Oct. 1.) If the launch does slip a day or two, the launch time would occur earlier on each subsequent day.

The launch has been delayed since September due to issues with SpaceX's Dragon capsule.

Can I watch SpaceX's Crew-13 launch online?

Yes, you'll be able to watch SpaceX's Crew-13 launch online, but exactly where is up to you.

Here at Space.com, we'll carry a simulcast of NASA's Crew-13 launch livestream, which will begin Thursday at 9:20 a.m. EDT (1320 GMT). That launch will be followed by a post-launch press conference at 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 GMT).

While you can watch all of that on this page, you can also follow the launch directly from NASA via YouTube, NASA+ or the agency's social media channels. SpaceX is also expected to host its own launch webcast on its Crew-13 mission page and X social media page

You'll also be able to see live views of SpaceX's Crew-13 rocket on the pad about 6 hours before launch via the Kennedy Space Center Newsroom YouTube page here.

There are a series of other Crew-13 live TV events you should be aware of aside from the launch. Here's a look.

Sept. 30: Crew-13 prelaunch briefing

One day before launch, on Wednesday, Sept. 30, NASA will hold a prelaunch briefing to discuss the details of the Crew-13 launch to the ISS. That briefing will begin at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) and be held at the Kennedy Space Center. Here's a look at the speakers:

• Dr. Lori Glaze, associate administrator, Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Dana Weigel, manager, Low Earth Orbit Program, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston
• Mathieu Caron, director, Astronauts, Life Sciences, and Space Medicine, CSA
• William Gerstenmaier, vice president, Build and Flight Reliability, SpaceX
• Arlena Moses, launch weather officer, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s 45th Weather Squadron

Oct. 1: Crew-13 launch day

As we mentioned above, NASA's launch webcast for Crew-13 will begin at 9:20 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 1. That's just under 2 hours before launch, with the livestream continuing until spacecraft separation.

Crew-13 will fly a short trajectory to the ISS that should take just under 8 hours. So there are several more events to follow beyond liftoff.

12:45 p.m. EDT: Post-lanch press conference

NASA will hold a press conference to celebrate the Crew-13 launch, with NASA's Administrator Jared Isaacman expected to lead the event. It should last up to an hour, with the speakers below attending.

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• Dr. Lori Glaze, associate administrator, Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Dana Weigel, manager, Low Earth Orbit Program, NASA Johnson
• Mathieu Caron, director, Astronauts, Life Sciences, and Space Medicine, CSA
• Julianna Scheiman, director, NASA Science and Dragon Programs, SpaceX

5:20 p.m. EDT: Crew-13 docking coverage

NASA's docking coverage for the SpaceX Crew Dragon mission will begin at 5:20 p.m. EDT (2120 GMT) and last through approach and docking, which is scheduled for 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT).

A separate livestream will be available on NASA's YouTube channel and NASA+ for the rendezvous.

Depending on timing, NASA may also host a separate livestream for the welcome ceremony and hatch opening, when the two crews become one, which is scheduled for 8:45 p.m. EDT (0045 GMT).

Who is launching on SpaceX's Crew-13 mission?

The four-person crew of SpaceX's Crew-13 mission for NASA is a mix of space travelers, three of whom are rookies. The mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins. Her fellow NASA astronaut Luke Delaney serves as pilot.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryanikov round out the crew as mission specialists. Here's a snapshot of each of the Crew-13 astronauts as they begin their Expedition 75 mission to the ISS.

How long is SpaceX's Crew-13 flight to the ISS?

SpaceX's Crew-13 mission (at least its launch and docking phase) is expected to last about 7 hours and 50 minutes. That's how long it will take the Crew Dragon Grace spacecraft to reach the ISS. The spacecraft is making its second flight after flying four private astronauts to the station on the Ax-4 commercial flight for Axiom Space.

After launch, Grace will carry Watkins and her crew around Earth in a series of orbits to meet up with the ISS. The capsule will dock itself at the ISS at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) at a forward-facing port on the station's U.S.-built Harmony module. You can watch it live here at 5:20 p.m. EDT (2120 GMT).

After docking, the Crew-13 astronauts will formally join the station's Expedition 75 crew in a hatch opening and welcome ceremony that is scheduled for 8:45 p.m. EDT (0045 Oct. 2 GMT).

Here's SpaceX's rundown of the launch schedule to plan your watch session.

What if SpaceX can't launch Crew-13 on Oct. 1?

If SpaceX is unable to launch the Crew-13 astronauts for NASA on Oct. 1, the company can try again on Friday, Oct. 2.

A launch on Oct. 2 would occur at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT) in order to place the Crew Dragon capsule on track to reach the International Space Station later that day.

Any additional launch windows will likely depend on the nature of the delay, as well as availability on the Eastern Range used by Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Visit Space.com com on Oct. 1 for live launch coverage of SpaceX's Crew-13 astronaut launch for NASA.

The SpaceX megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit for the first time ever on Monday (Sept. 28), during its 14th test flight to date. Starship also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink V3 broadband satellites on Flight 14, kicking off construction of a constellation that will eventually harbor 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.

These were big successes, but they didn't vault Starship into full technological maturity; the rocket will have to clear a few more hurdles to get there. Here's a brief rundown of the most important ones.

Catching the Ship upper stage

Both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both of these vehicles back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX thinks this recovery strategy will enable fast and efficient reuse, allowing the company to achieve seemingly outrageous launch cadences. Indeed, the company is targeting 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030, Elon Musk has said.

SpaceX has already pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy, doing so on three Starship test flights to date. But the company has yet to attempt one with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship, which has always targeted an ocean splashdown to wrap up its missions.

That could change very soon. During an appearance at the All-In Summit on Sept. 14, Musk said that SpaceX may try to catch Ship on Flight 15, provided that Flight 14 went well.

The company has not laid out a mission profile for Flight 15, but Monday's success would seem to keep a Ship catch in play. We don't have an official launch date for the upcoming mission, either, but provisional planning documents peg Oct. 19 as the earliest possible target.

And another note about that launch cadence: SpaceX aims to achieve it by expanding launch operations of Starship, which has previously flown from just two pads at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX is currently building three Starship pads on Florida's Space Coast, and it plans to break ground on the $100 billion, 12-pad Starship Louisiana complex in 2027. So that work will be going in the background of each upcoming Starship flight.

Off-Earth propellant transfer

Most Starship missions will stay in Earth orbit, deploying satellites for the Starlink V3 constellation and the company's even bigger "Starmind" data center network, which will consist of about a million satellites, if all goes to plan.

But some of the megarocket launches will send Ship farther afield — to the moon and Mars, for example. Indeed, NASA picked Starship's upper stage to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next decade or so.

Deep-space Starship missions will be more complicated than orbital ones, because they require more propellant. Ship cannot launch with much fuel onboard — doing so would make it too heavy — so each Ship bound for the moon or Mars will need to visit an off-Earth fuel depot, which itself will be a Ship variant.

This depot will need to be fueled up by special Ship "tanker" vehicles. It's unclear how many tanker flights will be required for each deep-space Ship mission, but the number is not negligible. For example, estimates for a Ship lunar-landing campaign range from eight tanker missions on the low end to 15 or 20 on the high end.

So in-space fueling is a key capability that Starship must demonstrate. SpaceX has taken some baby steps to this end already, successfully transferring propellant from one internal tank to another on Ship during Flight 3 back in March 2024.

But the company has not yet moved propellant from one vehicle to another in space. SpaceX may decide to try this as soon as Flight 15, but that's just speculation; we need to wait for an official mission description.

Getting Starship ready for astronauts

Starship was always envisioned to be a crew-carrying spacecraft. When Musk introduced it to the world back in September 2016, he framed the megarocket — then known as the Interplanetary Transport System — as the key breakthrough that would make Mars settlement feasible.

So SpaceX will need to incorporate a suite of life-support technologies into Starship and test them extensively before putting any people on board. And the clock is ticking on this task, thanks to the timeline that NASA has laid out for Artemis.

The agency plans to launch the crewed Artemis III mission in mid-2027, sending its Orion crew capsule to dock with Ship in Earth orbit. It's unclear if Ship will need to be crew-capable by then — the Artemis III astronauts may not enter Ship — but it will definitely have to be people-friendly by the time Artemis IV rolls around in 2028. That mission will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, in the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.

And the timeline isn't the only driver for SpaceX. There's also competition for these flights; NASA has said it may fly Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander on Artemis III and/or Artemis IV if Ship isn't ready.

SpaceX won't be starting from scratch with its life-support tech; it can (and probably already has begun to) scale up the systems it has used on its Crew Dragon capsule, which has flown 20 astronaut missions to low Earth orbit to date.

As this partial list shows, the next few Starship missions should be just as exciting as Flight 14, if not more so. There will likely be a lot riding on each one.

Construction of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink satellite megaconstellation is officially underway.

The milestone occurred today (Sept. 28), during the 14th test flight of the company's Starship megarocket. The 407-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14 — and it did something productive while it was up there.

Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, successfully delivered 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 (V3) Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) today. And we got great views of the deployment, from cameras aboard Ship and on the satellites.

SpaceX currently operates more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO — by far the largest spacecraft network ever assembled. But the Starlink V3 megaconstellation will be a completely different animal.

For starters, Starlink V3 satellites are about twice as heavy as their predecessors, tipping the scales here on Earth at roughly 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms). They can fly efficiently only on the ultrapowerful Starship; they're too big to launch aboard SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which built the original Starlink constellation.

The new Starlinks are also far more capable.

"The Starlink V3 satellite is designed to support 1 Tbps [terabytes per second] of downlink and 160 Gbps [gigabytes per second] of uplink capacity. That's an ~10x improvement in downlink capacity and an ~22x increase in uplink capacity from the Starlink V2 satellite," SpaceX representatives wrote in a description of the technology.

"The V3 satellite's antennas support both 2,048 downlink and uplink beams," they added. "For comparison, Starlink V2 satellite's phased arrays supported 192 downlink and 144 uplink beams."

Thanks to these and other enhancements, "we'll be able to deploy ~20x the capacity per Starship launch into the constellation as compared to a Falcon 9 launch of V2 satellites," SpaceX wrote.

And there will be a lot of Starship Starlink launches in the coming months and years, if all goes according to plan.

The Starlink V3 constellation will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. Starship can carry up about 60 Starlink V3s on each mission, so just getting to 100,000 will require nearly 1,700 liftoffs. More will be needed to maintain the constellation, of course; Starlink satellites have an operational lifetime of about five years, so they'll have to be replaced regularly.

But Starship could fly even more frequently in service of another megaconstellation — one that's bigger by an order of magnitude. SpaceX intends to operate a million of its "Starmind" AI data centers in Earth orbit, and all of them will ride on Starship's back.

Indeed, SpaceX aims to launch Starship 10,000 times per year by 2030, Musk has said — an outrageous cadence that the company thinks is possible because the vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. For perspective: the Falcon 9 flew 165 times in 2025, which was a company record and represented half of all orbital missions worldwide for that year.

SpaceX took a big step toward meeting those ambitious goals with today's success, but Starship still has some boxes to check. For example, missions to the moon and Mars — which are definitely in the cards, according to SpaceX — will require Ship to be fueled up in Earth orbit, something that the company has not yet demonstrated.

And Ship will start carrying humans into the final frontier in the near future, if all goes to plan. So SpaceX will need to install a life-support system in Ship, and launch some test flights to demonstrate that it works.

SpaceX has considerable experience in this regard, having flown 20 astronaut missions aboard its Crew Dragon capsule to date. But Starship and Dragon, which generally carries just four people per flight, are very different vehicles, so some scale-up will be required.

Starship just went where it had never gone before.

SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit today (Sept. 28), notching a huge milestone on the road to operational flight. But the launch, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, was not without high drama.

During liftoff, one of the six engines on Starship's Ship upper stage went out, raising doubt about whether SpaceX would attempt to reach orbit after all. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot even announced it was called off, only to reverse course as flight controllers decided to press ahead.

"We are not giving up yet," Huot said. "We will continue to hang out."

And the call came just a few minutes later: Starship was "go" for orbit. About 25 minutes after liftoff, Ship fired a single Raptor engine briefly to enter orbit. It was the primary goal of SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 launch test: Reach orbit for the first time and deploy 26 Starlink satellites into an operational orbit.

"Starship is orbital," mission control confirmed, eliciting cheers from the SpaceX employees watching the launch live at Starbase.

"First orbital flight of Starship successful!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on SpaceX's X platform.

• SpaceX Starship Flight 14 live updates: Starship is in orbit!

The rocket of the future

Starship stands 407 feet (124 meters) tall and can haul more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit, according to its SpaceX specs page. The rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage are both designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX thinks this combination of power and reflight will be transformative, allowing humanity to expand its footprint into the final frontier like never before. For example, Elon Musk has repeatedly cited Starship's potential to make Mars settlement economically feasible.

NASA is invested in this vision as well. The space agency picked Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.

If all goes according to plan, Starship's Ship upper stage will fly on the crewed Artemis III mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and put astronauts down near the moon's south pole a year later with Artemis IV. (According to SpaceX's plan, anyway; NASA also selected Blue Origin to supply Artemis crewed landers, and it's unclear at the moment which vehicle will fly Artemis IV.)

A busy and ambitious test flight

Starship lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas today at 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT; 7:48 a.m. local Texas time), kicking off its 14th test flight to date.

Flight 14 is the third Starship launch to feature Version 3 of the vehicle, a relatively mature iteration that's capable of deploying satellites and reaching the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Everything went according to plan initially. Super Heavy did what it was supposed to do, coming back down to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. It appeared to experience several engine shutdowns during flight, but nothing serious enough to affect the landing. Meanwhile, Ship continued on its upward ascent, inserting into low Earth orbit (LEO) about a half-hour into the flight.

But SpaceX wasn't content with just getting to LEO. Ship carried 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink V3 broadband satellites, which it successfully deployed over a 30-minute stretch starting at about T+34 minutes. These are the first members of a megaconstellation that will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to Musk. (Ship deployed V3 Starlinks on Flight 13 in July, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and soon fell back to Earth.)

Three of the 26 Starlinks were outfitted with cameras, which they used to scan Ship. SpaceX engineers will study this imagery to see if they can improve Ship's heat shield, which allows the vehicle to survive the fiery trip down through Earth's atmosphere at the end of its missions.

Ship kept circling Earth for a while after deploying the Starlink satellites — though not nearly as long as originally planned. SpaceX wanted Ship to complete about six orbits and splash down off the coast of Chile 9 hours and 50 minutes after launch, but mission controllers decided to shave nearly seven hours off that flight time.

Ship started reentering our planet's atmosphere about two hours and 40 minutes after launch and went subsonic — breaking the sound barrier, in the fast-to-slow direction — 26 minutes later. The vehicle splashed down intact in the northern Pacific Ocean three hours and eight minutes after liftoff, causing another eruption of cheers from the folks gathered at Starbase.

Ship then toppled over and exploded when it hit the waves, providing a dramatic capper to a very exciting day for SpaceX.

Despite all of today's successes, SpaceX still has some work to do to get Starship fully up and running.

For example, the company plans to bring Super Heavy and Ship down on the launch pad at the end of each mission, catching both vehicles with the launch tower's "chopstick" arms — a recovery strategy meant to make reuse quicker and more efficient. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three test flights to date but has yet to try one with Ship.

And Starship missions that go to the moon or Mars will require multiple launches of "tanker" spacecraft to fuel up Ship in Earth orbit. SpaceX has not yet demonstrated off-Earth refueling, so that will be another big box to check.

SpaceX will also need to install life-support systems ahead of crewed missions like Artemis IV — and it will doubtless fly Starship successfully many times before putting an astronaut on it. So stay tuned: There will probably be a lot more Starship action in the coming weeks and months.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:15 p.m. EDT with news of successful satellite deployment and Ship splashdown.

Update for Sept. 28, 12 p.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched a Starship into orbit for the first time today, deploying 26 Starlink satellites before making a splashdown in the Northern Pacific Ocean. See our full Starship Flight 14 launch story with amazing videos and photos. Plus, don't miss these stunning views of Starship in orbit as seen by Starlink.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will attempt to go orbital for the first time ever on Monday morning (Sept. 28), and you can watch the historic action live.

Starship is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time).

You can watch it in the window above, courtesy of SpaceX. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing a towering 407 feet (124 meters) tall when fully stacked. Both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX has called the "holy grail of rocketry."

The company believes that Starship will open the heavens like never before, allowing humanity to settle the moon and Mars, and perhaps venture even farther afield. But the rocket is not yet ready for such world-changing work; it's still in the flight-test phase.

Starship debuted in April 2023 and now has 13 missions under its belt, all of them suborbital. That figures to change on Monday, however, when the giant vehicle launches for the 14th time.

Flight 14 will send the 171-foot-tall (52 m) Ship to Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink Version 3 internet satellites. These will be the first members of a new megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft. (SpaceX currently operates about 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO).

Ship will circle our planet six times, then head home for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Chile nearly 10 hours after launch. This will be quite a departure from Starship's suborbital flights, which lasted a maximum of 65 minutes and targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

Super Heavy won't stay up for nearly so long; it's scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, as it has on previous flights.

During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.

That box will be checked on another flight. And Starship will have other hurdles to clear as well, even if today's flight goes perfectly. For example, each Starship mission beyond Earth orbit will require multiple rendezvous with "tanker" Ships to fuel up the voyaging spacecraft. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate off-Earth propellant transfer, so we will doubtless see that milestone on an upcoming test flight.

Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.

For the third time this month, SpaceX has sent a national security mission to orbit.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the USSF-385 mission for the U.S. Space Force launched from California's foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT; 7:00 a.m. local California time).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 10th launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated 1100.

We don't know much about USSF-385; its payloads, and their activities, are classified. We don't even know exactly where it's headed. SpaceX cut off its launch webcast shortly after booster touchdown, as it usually does on national security missions. (Generally, the company keeps its streams going through payload deployment.)

This was the third Space Force flight in the past 16 days for SpaceX. Falcon 9s also launched the classified USSF-153 and USSF-259 missions from Vandenberg on Sept. 10 and Sept. 16, respectively.

The Falcon 9 has now flown 108 times in 2026. The vast majority of these missions — 75% of them — have been dedicated to building out SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation, which currently consists of more than 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit.

SpaceX has also launched two flights apiece of its Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets so far this year. And it's gearing up for the third Starship launch of 2026, which is scheduled to take place Monday morning (Sept. 28) during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT).

This test flight, which you can watch here at Space.com, is a big one for the Starship program and for SpaceX overall. Starship will attempt to reach orbit, something the megarocket has never done before.

Update for Sept. 28, 12 p.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched a Starship into orbit for the first time today, deploying 26 Starlink satellites before making a splashdown in the Northern Pacific Ocean. See our full Starship Flight 14 launch story with amazing videos and photos. Plus, don't miss these stunning views of Starship in orbit as seen by Starlink.

SpaceX has already built the world's largest rocket with its Starship and will attempt to put that giant vehicle in orbit for the first time today (Sept. 28). But if you're hoping to watch the history-making launch yourself, you'll need to know exactly where and when to tune in. We've got all the details you need below.

The first-ever orbital Starship launch, SpaceX's Flight 14 test flight, is scheduled to launch from the company's Starbase proving ground in South Texas no earlier than Sept. 28. Liftoff is set for 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT). You can follow the mission live on our Starship Flight 14 launch updates page.

Flight 14 will mark the 14th Starship test flight for SpaceX and the third Starship flight this year. It follows SpaceX's success of Starship Flight 13 in July, which the company touted as its softest Ship upper-stage landing ever — so soft, in fact, that the Ship splashed down and floated for weeks, allowing SpaceX to recover it from the sea for study at Starbase.

But now it's time for the more than 400-foot-tall (121 meters) Starship to reach orbit, a feat SpaceX must achieve if it is to land NASA's Artemis astronauts on the moon with a Ship by 2028. Here's what to know.

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 launch?

SpaceX is now aiming to launch Starship Flight 14 no earlier than 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT) on Monday, Sept. 28. But it is possible the launch may occur up to over an hour later, depending on conditions at the Starbase pad.

Starship Flight 14 actually has a 75-minute window in which to launch, and it opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT), so the exact timing could shift a bit later if bad weather or a technical glitch delays the countdown. That means the launch could occur anytime between 8:15 a.m. EDT and 9:30 a.m. EDT (1215-1330 GMT). SpaceX's official livestream of the launch will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.

NOTE: Unlike past Starship flights, which have lasted about an hour, Flight 14 will run nearly 10 hours due to its orbital nature.

SpaceX may also have up to two backup days for launch, on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30, but the launch times for those days are expected to be the same.

Related: Read our SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy guide for a detailed look at the megarocket.

Can I watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 launch?

Yes, of course you'll be able to watch SpaceX launch its Starship Flight 14 orbital test flight. The company will host a live webcast of the launch, but you can also pick your venue on where to watch.

SpaceX's own livestream begins 30 minutes before liftoff (as mentioned above) and will be available via the SpaceX X account and the official Flight 14 mission page. If everything is on time, that livestream will begin at about 8:16 a.m. EDT (1216 GMT).

Space.com will simulcast the SpaceX Flight 14 launch webcast on this page, as well as an our homepage and YouTube channel.

A prelaunch show

If you can't wait until Sept. 28 to see live views of Starship Flight 14, you can tune in right now at NASASpaceflight, which has 24/7 live views of SpaceX's Starship pads at Starbase.

The NASASpaceflight Flight 14 launch webcast will begin on Sept. 28 at 4:15 a.m. EDT (0815 GMT), about four hours before launch. NASASpaceflight has many cameras in position around Starbase, and the company typically shares up-close video views and live commentary for preflight activities.

In-person launch options

As I've shared in past Starship launch guides, SpaceX does not have an official Starship launch viewing site near Starbase, but there are several places where you can see the liftoff in person.

For first-time spectators, I've always recommended watching a Starship launch from the rocky beach near the Cameron County Amphitheater at Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island. The park is across the bay from Starbase and draws a good crowd, offering a view of ships on the bay that frame the towering Starship launch pad. It's 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the launch site as the crow flies, and the park has bathrooms.

Traffic getting onto South Padre Island can be heavy on launch days if you're not staying at a hotel on the island (which is easier in my experience). If that's your situation, you may opt for watching from around Port Isabel. And you can always grab a bite at Hopper Haus, a SpaceX-themed bar that makes a mean burger.

There is also a shoreline stretch of Highway 48 between Brownsville and Port Isabel, from 6 to 8 miles (10 to 13 km) from the launch site, where you can pull up for the day to watch the launch. It's just the side of the highway, so you won't find amenities like bathrooms there. You can learn more about that here: SpaceLaunchSchedule.com.

If you want a closer view(and have cash for a $200 ticket, though kids under 17 are $40), you can camp at the Rocket Ranch. The campground is 3.8 miles (6.1 km) from the Starbase launch site, and your ticket allows you to camp there for one day and night. It has two viewing locations available, with its "Outpost" one offering the closest view and "unmatched media service," so you can stay connected. The other location is a bit farther away on the campground itself. The ticket includes bus transportation from the ranch campground to a viewing site and back for one launch attempt. I haven't visited this ranch, but I've been including it here as an option in case you want to try it. (If you do, let us know!) Longer, four-day camping packages are also available.

Be sure to read the full Rocket Ranch FAQ for details on the site.

How long is SpaceX's Starship Flight 14?

SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 orbital test flight will last just over 9 hours and 50 minutes and will mark the first time a Starship has reached orbit, if all goes to plan. It will also be the third flight of SpaceX's new Starship Version 3.

"Flight tests until this point have intentionally flown passively safe suborbital trajectories to maximize public safety while allowing for maximum learning," SpaceX wrote in a mission overview. "By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin."

Starship Flight 14 will launch from SpaceX's newer Pad 2 at Starbase on a path that should deliver it into an orbit nearly 171 miles (275 kilometers) above Earth. If all goes well, SpaceX hopes to orbit Earth six times with Starship before attempting a water landing.

Starship's Flight 13 test in July deployed Starlink V3 internet satellites, but on a suborbital trajectory, so they soon reentered Earth's atmosphere. Flight 14 will carry the first operational Starlink V3 satellites to be deployed in orbit.

"Starship will deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit for the first time, which aim to greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds," SpaceX wrote. "Each Starlink V3 satellite will add 1 Tbps of capacity to the constellation, for a total of 26 Tbps of capacity added on this mission alone. That’s ~10x the capacity compared to a single launch of V2 mini Starlink satellites on Falcon 9."

Flight 14's Ship upper stage is expected to deploy the Starlink satellites through a Pez dispenser-like door starting about 34 minutes after liftoff. The entire process should take about 30 minutes.

SpaceX will not try to catch either the giant Starship Super Heavy booster or the Ship upper stage on this flight. The Super Heavy first stage is expected to make a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico while the Ship upper stage splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile. That is a departure from past flights, which have had the Ship upper stage splash down in the Indian Ocean.

What if Starship Flight 14 can't launch on Sept. 28?

As with every launch, there is a chance that something may come up the day of launch and prevent liftoff. In that event, SpaceX appears to have at least two backup days in case it is unable to launch on Sept. 28.

Officials say there are alternate launch dates available on Tuesday, Sept. 29 and Wednesday, Sept. 30, if needed. Those dates are alternate beach closure dates for Boca Chica Beach, which is a beach near Starbase, and a good indicator of when SpaceX plans to fly.

You'll be able to follow SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 mission on Space.com as it happens. Be sure to come back on launch day for complete Starship Flight 14 coverage.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect SpaceX's new launch time for Starship Flight 14.

SpaceX is targeting Sept. 28 for Starship’s Flight 14, the next liftoff of its industry-shaking launch vehicle, and is planning to fly the towering spacecraft farther and longer than it has ever flown, with a very specific destination in mind: orbit. Of the baker’s-dozen launches so far under its belt, Starship has only ever flown suborbitally. Succeeding in its first orbital endeavor will serve as a huge milestone for the rocket, which is still in development.

Liftoff on Sept. 28 is scheduled during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT). With orbit as the goal, the mission is expected to last much longer than previous Starship launches — about 10 hours from liftoff to splashdown of the rocket’s Ship upper stage, compared to past suborbital flights that have each only lasted about an hour. Rather than its previous arching trajectories above the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, Starship will soar to an altitude of approximately 170 miles (275 kilometers), where it will circle the planet around six times before executing a deorbit burn to initiate its return.

SpaceX is taking the opportunity to load Starship with a stack of 26 operational Starlink Version 3 (V3) satellites for deployment in low Earth orbit (LEO). This batch will be the first of more than 100,000 upgraded Starlink spacecraft designed to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services. SpaceX has deployed sets of Starlink V3 test payloads on previous Starship launches, but due to their suborbital trajectory, all of them quickly came back down to Earth. Three of the V3 Starlinks going up on Flight 14 are equipped with cameras for peering back at Starship after their deployment to inspect the spacecraft’s heat-shield tiles — an essential component to the success of Starship’s ultimate purpose.

SpaceX is designing Starship as the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicle — what the company calls “The Holy Grail of Rocketry” (which is also the title of SpaceX’s latest documentary-style episode chronicling the rocket’s development). Starship’s Super Heavy first-stage booster and Ship upper stage are being designed with the capability to perform deceleration and landing burns for a return to their launch site, where they will be caught mid-air using massive chopstick-like arms on a pair of adjacent “Mechazilla” launch towers for refurbishment and reflight.

As the company has worked toward that goal, it has crossed several milestones off Starship’s list of technical feats needed to realize the rocket’s eventual rapid reusability. For example, SpaceX has made three successful catches of Super Heavy back at SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas, launch facility, and has executed a handful of Raptor 3 single-engine relights on Ship while in space.

SpaceX hasn’t attempted a Super Heavy return to launch site and catch since introducing the most recent Starship design upgrade, Version 3, which lifted off for the first time on Flight 12 in May. None of Starship’s launches have yet attempted a return and catch of the rocket’s Ship upper stage. Instead, the two Starship V3 vehicles that have launched this year targeted soft splashdowns at sea for Ship and Super Heavy, in order to fine-tune landing burn procedures without risking damage to the major launch infrastructure at Starbase. That will be the case for Flight 14 as well.

SpaceX has made “several modifications” to Super Heavy’s hardware to address issues discovered during previous flights, according to the company's Flight 14 mission page, and will send at least one more of the Starship boosters to a watery grave to ensure those modifications are all working as expected. Flight 14's Super Heavy (Booster 21, for those keeping track) will follow a similar trajectory to its previous flights, with its primary objectives after stage separation being a successful boostback burn, followed by a landing burn and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ship (Ship 41, if you’re counting), on the other hand, will fly a very new mission compared to its previous jaunts in space. Its initial trajectory after stage separation will put the spacecraft on the same course as previous flights, arching toward a reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. But it will then head for orbit, if all systems are “go.” SpaceX clarified its criteria for entering orbit on the Flight 14 page, stating, “Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission.”

Approximately 25 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft will fire one or more of its three vacuum-optimized Raptor 3 engines for an orbital insertion maneuver, which is expected to last only about 20 seconds. SpaceX has included splashdown contingency locations in case the need for an early deorbit arises, and plans to be “intentionally conservative” in its abort criteria to ensure flight safety. Should that phase of flight execute nominally, however, SpaceX has slated the half-hour-long Starlink deployment procedure to begin about 10 minutes later. Then the coast phase of the mission will begin.

SpaceX is planning for Starship to complete six orbits of Earth over the course of about eight hours, during which the company hopes to stream live views of the planet from Ship’s onboard cameras. At the end of its coast phase, the spacecraft will fire a single-engine deorbit burn using one of its sea-level Raptor 3s for a targeted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, wrapping up the Flight 14 mission approximately 10 hours after launch.

Orbit is a big step for Starship, provided SpaceX can pull it off. If the Flight 14 launch date remains on Sept. 28, it will mark exactly 10 years and one day from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s initial unveiling of the company’s Starship design (then dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System, or ITS) at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016.

Since then, the ambitious launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful in history, has undergone a decade of modifications, ground tests and increasingly complex launch profiles, with progress marked by a mixture of achievements and setbacks along the way. But the pressure to get Starship operational is mounting.

NASA is counting on a lunar lander version of the vehicle for its Artemis program architecture, which includes an uncrewed article for docking tests in Earth orbit with NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Artemis III crew in mid-2027, and a crewed lunar landing mission in 2028 on Artemis IV. SpaceX is also eager for Starship’s massive payload capacity to begin deploying its much larger Starlink V3s at scale and, eventually, help assemble an even larger constellation of orbital AI data centers that Musk envisions. That constellation will consist of a million spacecraft, if SpaceX gets regulatory approval.

Still, Starship has more feats to master before it can pull off all SpaceX has billed it for. At 407 feet tall (124 meters), Starship V3's Super Heavy is powered by 33 Raptor 3s, which provide about 18.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — enough to deliver up to 100 tons to orbit. SpaceX says that later Starship generations are being designed to double that payload capacity to around 200 tons. But realizing those design goals is contingent on SpaceX’s ability to mature Starship much further.

For Starship to follow through on SpaceX’s promises, the company still needs to tackle technological hurdles like on-orbit fuel transfers and long-term cryogenic propellant storage in space, both of which Starship needs in order to fly beyond LEO. On Artemis IV, for example, NASA estimates the Starship lunar lander will need up to a dozen refueling launches to top off its tanks enough to carry out its mission of delivering astronauts to the surface of the moon, where it's expected to remain for up to a week before then launching its crew back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Orion.

Those capabilities, though, lie farther (but presumably not too far) down Starship’s developmental timeline. Orbit is Flight 14’s primary focus, and only by achieving that milestone can SpaceX move on to clear the rocket’s remaining hurdles.

Rocket Lab launched another Earth-imaging radar satellite to orbit for the Japanese company Synspective on Friday night (Sept. 25).

The mission, called “Owlright, Owlright, Owlright,” lifted off aboard an Electron rocket from Pad B at Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand on Friday at 8:39 p.m. EDT (0039 GMT on Sept. 26).

Everything went well: The satellite was deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO) as planned, Rocket Lab announced via X.

It was the 13th Strix satellite that Rocket Lab has delivered to orbit for Synspective, which is building a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft to collect Earth-imaging data for municipality management efforts around city planning and infrastructure, as well as natural disaster response.

Owlright, Owlright, Owlright was Rocket Lab's 97th launch overall, and its 18th so far in 2026. This mission brings Electron’s 2026 total to 15, with three other launches this year of Rocket Lab’s suborbital HASTE rocket rounding out the sum.

Electron is Rocket Lab's workhorse launch vehicle. It stands 59 feet tall (18 meters), and sports a launch capacity to LEO up to 661 pounds (300 kilograms). Synspective’s Strix spacecraft weigh about 220 pounds (100 kg) each, and expand to a lengthy 16.4 feet (5 meters) wide after SAR antenna deployment.

Rocket Lab has committed to launching the entirety of Synspective’s Strix constellation, which aims to deliver 30 spacecraft to LEO by the end of the decade. Living up to their namesake — Strix is a genus of owl — the SAR satellites are designed to collect Earth-observation data even in poor lighting conditions, and can peer through cloud cover to study the ground below.

As the constellation expands, each Strix satellite has been delivered to a slightly different orbital destination. Electron sent the Owlright, Owlright, Owlright payload into a 37-degree orbital inclination, deploying it at a LEO altitude of 347 miles (559 kilometers).

Editor's note: This story was updated with news of successful launch and satellite deployment at 2:45 a.m. ET on Sept. 26.

Starship just cleared a major hurdle ahead of its first orbital flight.

SpaceX announced this afternoon (Sept. 24) that it has completed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the next flight of Starship, the huge, fully reusable rocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.

During a WDR, mission teams fuel up a vehicle and go through all of the major steps they will take on launch day, without actually igniting the engines. With this key test in the books, Starship remains on track to launch Monday morning (Sept. 28) on its 14th-ever test flight, which will take the 407-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle farther than it has ever gone before.

Starship debuted in April 2023. That launch, and the next 12 that followed, all sent Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, known as Ship, on a suborbital trajectory.

On Flight 14, however, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will go fast enough to enter orbit. Once up there, it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first members of a constellation that Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Ship will stay up for a while, if all goes to plan; it will circle Earth six times before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. (That splashdown zone is new as well; previous Starship flights targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.)

Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, will make a splashdown of its own in the Gulf of Mexico. This will occur about seven minutes after launch.

That will not be the end game on operational Starship flights, however. SpaceX wants to catch both Ship and Super Heavy back at the pad, using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this with Super Heavy on three previous flights but has not yet tried to do so with Ship.

Starship Flight 14 is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time).

You can watch all the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX. And there should be a lot to watch: The company has said it aims to keep the stream going for all six of Ship's orbits around Earth and its splashdown.

SpaceX has completed assembly of the Starship rocket slated to launch the test vehicle’s most ambitious mission to date.

Flight 14, the 14th full-stack launch of Starship’s test campaign, is slated to lift off during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT) on Sept. 28. The Super Heavy first stage for Flight 14, Booster 21, was transported to Starbase’s Pad 2 earlier this week, and its upper-stage Ship (Ship 41) joined its counterpart at the pad overnight on Wednesday (Sept. 23).

The two were stacked before the sun rose on the South Texas launch facility and are undergoing final checkouts before SpaceX performs a key fueling test known as a wet dress rehearsal, which is expected sometime Thursday (Sept. 24).

Flight 14 will be Starship’s first attempt at reaching orbit, and a major milestone for the launch vehicle that has now been in development for 10 years. If all goes according to plan, Flight 14 will also see the first deployment of SpaceX’s upgraded Starlink Version 3 (V3) high-speed internet satellites. Starship has carried small batches of V3 Starlinks on previous launches, but those missions’ suborbital trajectories meant the satellites burned up in Earth’s atmosphere rather than remaining in orbit.

Ship 41 has been loaded with 26 Starlink V3s, which, if successfully deployed, will be the very first in a constellation that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to grow to more than 100,000. The larger, more powerful Starlink V3s will eventually completely replace the existing Starlink network and, according to Musk, will occupy low Earth orbit (LEO) alongside an even larger network of more than 1 million AI data center satellites, if SpaceX gets regulatory approval.

Deploying these first V3 Starlinks will depend on Starship reaching orbit, a feat the rocket has yet to attempt. Starship’s first 13 flights all flew suborbital trajectories by design, as SpaceX fine-tuned the launch vehicle’s design. Like the Starlink satellites it’s carrying, Starship is also in its V3 design iteration. SpaceX is confident that the V3 Starship can carry out the elementary components of its immediate missions ahead: chiefly, reaching orbit, deploying its payload and returning safely to Earth.

Much beyond that requires clearing a few technological hurdles SpaceX has yet to tackle, such as orbital refueling and storing cryogenic propellants in space. For Starship to deliver payloads beyond LEO will require supplemental Starship “tanker” launches to replenish a primary Ship’s propellant. And SpaceX will need to overcome those obstacles to Starship’s full operational status soon.

In addition to SpaceX’s own eagerness to begin launching the Starlink V3 megaconstellation, NASA has also contracted the vehicle as a lunar lander for the Artemis program. NASA is expecting an orbital spacecraft capable of docking with the agency’s Orion spacecraft in time for Artemis III in mid-2027, and a crew-certified vehicle to land astronauts on the moon on Artemis IV, in 2028.

If everything goes smoothly during Thursday’s wet dress rehearsal, SpaceX will be free to proceed toward Flight 14’s Sept. 28 launch target, pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration . Unlike previous suborbital flights that have lasted only about an hour, Flight 14’s orbital jaunt is expected to last about 10 hours from liftoff to splashdown of Ship 41 in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX's massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, successfully launched into orbit for the first time on Flight 14 on Monday, Sept. 28, at 8:46 a.m. EDT (1246 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. The mission also delivered an operational stack of 26 upgraded Starlink V3 high-speed internet satellites to space.

Follow along here for our live updates as SpaceX completes preparations on the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, and progresses toward its 14th test launch of the Starship vehicle since 2023.

Flight 14 livestream | SpaceX | Starship | Starship V3 explained

September 24, 2026 – 9:52 AM

Starship Flight 14 wet dress rehearsal happening now

The sun has risen on SpaceX's towering Starship ahead of the rocket's Flight 14 launch and first attempt to reach orbit. The company completed stacking of Starship's Booster 21 and Ship 41 yesterday (Sept. 23), and is preparing to complete a series of tests and simulated launch run-through known as a wet dress rehearsal.

"Sunrise at Starbase," SpaceX said in a post on X. "Opportunistic full stack testing is planned ahead of Flight 14's launch, which is on track for Monday, Sept. 28, pending regulatory approval."

Monday's 75-minute launch window opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT). Instead of the aproximately one-hour mission durations of Starship's previous suborbital launches, Flight 14's orbital jaunt, if everything goes according to plan, is expected to last nearly 10 hours.

Today's wet dress rehearsal, which involves fully fueling Starship on the launch pad for a full countdown simulation run, is expected to wrap up later this morning.

SpaceX stacks massive Starship rocket ahead of 1st orbital launch attempt (video)

Sunrise at Starbase. Opportunistic full stack testing is planned ahead of Flight 14's launch, which is on track for Monday, Sept. 28, pending regulatory approval pic.twitter.com/VnwI5v4eXQSeptember 23, 2026

The four-person Crew-13 flight to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to launch on Oct. 1, the agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 22).

Things had been up in the air since Aug. 29, when NASA announced that an oxidizer leak had been detected in the propulsion system of Crew-13's Dragon spacecraft. That leak took the original launch date of Sept. 12 off the table, and we didn't get another firm target until Tuesday.

If all goes according to the new plan, Crew-13 will launch at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT) on Oct. 1 from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, riding a Falcon 9 rocket to low Earth orbit. It will arrive at the ISS roughly nine hours later, around 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT on Oct. 2).

You'll be able to watch all of this spaceflight action here at Space.com when the time comes.

Crew-13 will deliver four astronauts to the orbiting lab — NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, the Canadian Space Agency's Josh Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos. The quartet will live and work on the ISS for about seven months, performing a variety of scientific experiments and station maintenance work.

Crew-13 will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission, who have been living on the ISS since mid-February.

The two crews will overlap for a few days. Then Crew-12 — which consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, will come home.

The nation successfully test-launched "a new type of weapon" on Sunday (Sept. 20), the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) announced today (Sept. 22).

KCNA did not provide details about the test. But photos suggest that it involved a short-range missile topped with a hypersonic warhead, according to NK News, a Seoul-based publication that focuses on happenings in the Hermit Kingdom.

Hypersonic vehicles travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound and are highly maneuverable. They are therefore much harder to track and intercept than ballistic missiles, which, though very fast, follow predictable trajectories.

The United States and a number of other countries have been developing hypersonic weapon systems for a number of years now, so it's no big surprise that North Korea is working on one as well.

And that system is pretty advanced, according to KCNA, which said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was present for Sunday's test.

KCNA said that Kim described the system as a type of "ultra-modern defense technology" that "would give the enemy an incurable headache and a very cruel and unavoidable blow," according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.

It's unclear how seriously to take such claims, however. Bluster and bravado are big parts of the playbook for North Korea, an isolated and oft-sanctioned autocracy that the Kim family has ruled since 1948. Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, turning multiple cities into "seas of fire."

These threats have been empty to date, of course, but they cannot be dismissed out of hand: North Korea has dozens of nuclear warheads, and the country is working to develop more powerful, longer-range missiles with which to deliver them.

Pyongyang's missile tests sometimes coincide with events involving the United States or South Korea, which North Korea regards as its two chief adversaries. Last month, for example, the nation launched a missile in the leadup to planned joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises.

The timing of this latest test may have been designed to send a message as well. After all, it "came ahead of the U.N. General Assembly's high-level general debate, slated to open Tuesday (U.S. time), and the upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on Thursday," Yonhap wrote.

North Korea may be "signaling to the Trump administration that it has no intention of curbing its military buildup," the outlet added.

Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, was rolled out to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, the company revealed in an X post today (Sept. 21).

The booster will be paired with its Ship upper stage on the launch mount soon. If all goes according to plan, the duo will lift off on Sept. 28, on Starship's most ambitious flight to date.

The upcoming test mission will be Starship's 14th to date but the first to go orbital.

The flight plan calls for Super Heavy to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Ship, meanwhile, will power its way to low Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites.

Flight 14 will therefore begin assembly of the Starlink V3 broadband megaconstellation, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites. (Ship deployed 20 V3 Starlinks two months ago on Flight 13, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and quickly came back down to Earth.)

Ship will stay in orbit for a while, circling our planet about six times before returning for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile roughly 10 hours after launch.

This will be a new landing locale for Ship; its suborbital missions came down in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its current iteration stands 408 feet (124 meters) tall, and future versions will be even larger, Musk has said.

In addition, both of its stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — the "holy grail of rocketry," according to SpaceX. The company thinks Starship will revolutionize spaceflight, making settlement of the moon and Mars economically feasible at long last.

The growing diversity and capability of China's launch sector were on display last week.

Four different Chinese orbital rockets lifted off in a 45-hour span from Tuesday (Sept. 15) to Wednesday (Sept. 16), flying from three different launch sites.

Two of the rockets were private vehicles — and all four aced their missions.

The action started Tuesday at 2:26 a.m. EDT (0626 GMT), when the Beijing company LandSpace sent one of its Zhuque-2E rockets up from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.

The Zhuque-2E — which burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen like SpaceX's in-development Starship megarocket — hauled 10 satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for the Qianfan ("Thousand Sails") broadband megaconstellation. If all goes to plan, Qianfan will eventually consist of about 15,000 active spacecraft.

Another nine Qianfan satellites went up at 6:00 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) on Tuesday atop a Gravity-1 rocket, which launched from a barge off the coast of Shanghai.

The Gravity-1, operated by the company Orienspace, is the world's most powerful solid rocket — though it's probably better known for its almost comically squat and stubby profile.

Next up was a Long March 12 rocket, which is flown by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

It lifted off on Wednesday at 8:32 p.m. EDT (0032 GMT on Sept. 17) from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan and carried nine spacecraft for another Chinese LEO broadband megaconstellation called SatNet, which is envisioned to harbor about 13,000 satellites.

A Kuaizhou-11 rocket finished the four-flight flurry about two hours later, launching from Jiuquan at 10:40 p.m. EDT (0240 GMT on Sept. 17).

The vehicle, which is operated by a subsidiary of the state-run China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, carried two Earth-observing radar satellites for the Chinese company Spacety.

The quartet of launches didn't give us a full picture of China's launch ambitions, however, for none of the four rockets attempted a landing.

The nation is working hard to develop reusable rockets and has already made considerable progress on this front. In the last 2.5 months, two different vehicles — LandSpace's Zhuque-3 and CASC's Long March 10B — have successfully landed their first stages during orbital missions. No Chinese first stage has flown multiple orbital missions thus far, but that box could be checked fairly soon.

SpaceX launched yet another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit today (Sept. 19).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 27 Starlink craft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 9:47 p.m. EDT (6:47 p.m. local time; 0147 GMT on Sept. 20).

The rocket's first stage returned to Earth about 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 17th flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1093.

The Falcon 9's upper stage hauled the 27 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, deploying them as planned about 62 minutes after launch.

There were already a lot of them up there: The ever-growing Starlink megaconstellation currently consists of more than 11,100 active spacecraft, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

Saturday's launch was the 107th Falcon 9 mission of 2026, and the 81st of the year dedicated to building out the Starlink network.

Those numbers are impressive, but they don't quite match SpaceX's record-breaking 2025 cadence: Last year, the Falcon 9 flew 165 times, and 122 of those were Starlink missions. (If SpaceX maintains its current rates this year, 2026 will see a total of 149 Falcon 9 launches, 113 of which are Starlink flights.)

Rocket Lab launched a Japanese Earth-observing radar satellite to orbit tonight (Sept. 18).

An Electron rocket carrying a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft for the Tokyo-based company Synspective lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site tonight at 11:22 p.m. EDT (0322 GMT and 3:22 p.m. local time on Sept. 19).

SAR satellites can study Earth both night and day and peer through cloudy skies. Synspective is assembling a constellation of such spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO), which it calls Strix, after a widespread genus of owls.

The Strix network "provides data for urban development planning, construction and infrastructure monitoring and disaster response" in Japan, Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description.

Rocket Lab has been the sole launch provider for this constellation to date. Tonight's mission was the 12th the company has performed to build the Strix network, with another 15 on the books in the future.

Electron delivered the single Strix satellite to LEO, 355 miles (572 kilometers) above Earth, about 53 minutes after liftoff as planned.

Rocket Lab tends to give Synspective launches owl-themed names. Tonight's mission, for example, was called "Owl by the Dozen." It was Rocket Lab's 17th launch of 2026 and 96th overall.

Most of these flights have been performed by the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, a two-stage vehicle that gives small satellites dedicated rides to the final frontier. But Rocket Lab also flies a suborbital version of Electron called HASTE, which debuted in June 2023 and now has nine launches under its belt.

The company is also developing a more powerful, partially reusable orbital rocket called Neutron, which could debut late this year or in early 2027.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:10 a.m. ET on Sept. 19 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back by nearly a week.

SpaceX had originally targeted Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more.

Today (Sept. 17), however, SpaceX announced a new launch date — Sept. 28. It gave no explanation for the delay.

Liftoff, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.

The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Starship, which debuted in April 2023 and has flown twice so far in 2026. But the 408-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle's first 13 jaunts were all suborbital, so Flight 14 will be a landmark.

"By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 14 mission description.

"This will also mark the first time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that will dramatically expand connectivity speeds and reliability around the world," the company added.

Starlink, SpaceX's network of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit, currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft. None of those are the larger, more capable V3 version, which are designed to launch on Starship.

Flight 14 will carry up 26 of these next-gen craft — the first of many, if all goes to plan. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company wants the Starlink megaconstellation to eventually consist of 100,000 V3 satellites.

Three of the Starlink craft launching on Flight 14 have been outfitted with cameras and will photograph the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, after deployment. SpaceX will use this imagery to study and potentially improve the heat shield, which protects Ship during its return trip through Earth's atmosphere.

If all goes according to plan on Sept. 28, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will complete six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers). The vehicle will then maneuver its way to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

That's a very different plan than previous Starship flights. On those suborbital missions, Ship stayed aloft for just 65 minutes or so, did not complete an orbit of Earth and came down in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

But Flight 14 will be more of the same for Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy. If all goes to plan, the giant rocket will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, as it has done on a number of previous flights.

So there will be no catch — of either Ship or Super Heavy — by the "chopstick" arms of Starbase's launch tower on Flight 14. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three occasions to date but has never done so with Ship. This recovery method will eventually be the norm on Starship flights, leading to faster and more efficient reuse of the vehicle, Musk has said.

So, while Flight 14 aims to check a very big box — reaching orbit — other milestones will be reserved for future flights. A Ship tower catch will be among the most anticipated, along with refueling the vehicle in orbit, something that will be required for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on Sept. 17. It first ran on Sept. 15 with the original target launch date of Sept. 22.

SpaceX launched its second classified mission for the U.S. Space Force in less than a week tonight (Sept. 16).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 9:07 p.m. EDT (6:07 p.m. local California time; 0107 GMT on Sept. 17).

We don't know much about tonight's mission, which was called USSF-259. SpaceX's webcast didn't shed any light of note; it ended shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth for a landing in the Pacific Ocean atop a drone ship about 8.5 minutes after launch.

That touchdown was the 13th for this particular booster, which is designated 1097. One of the booster's previous landings was a big milestone for SpaceX. This past April, B1097 pulled off SpaceX's 600th touchdown of an orbital-class rocket, during a launch that sent 25 of the company's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit.

Tonight's mission was the second that SpaceX has flown for the U.S. Space Force in a six-day span: A Falcon 9 launched the similarly classified USSF-153 from Vandenberg on Sept. 10.

Tonight's launch was SpaceX's 110th of 2026. The vast majority of the company's flights so far this year — 106 of them, in fact — have been performed by the workhorse Falcon 9.

The powerful Falcon Heavy has launched twice in 2026, as has SpaceX's next-gen megarocket, Starship. Both Starship liftoffs this year have been suborbital test flights. The next Starship launch, which is expected to occur in the next two weeks, will apparently take the vehicle orbital for the first time.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:50 p.m. ET on Sept. 15 with the new launch date of Sept. 16. It was updated agai at 9:28 p.m. ET on Sept. 16 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

Two European Earth-observing spacecraft lifted off from South America tonight (Sept. 14).

A Vega C rocket carrying the FLEX and Copernicus-3C satellites launched from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 9:21 p.m. EDT (10:21 p.m. local time in Kourou and 0121 GMT on Sept. 15).

Both FLEX and Sentinel-3C were deployed as planned. They were released at an altitude of about 509 miles (820 kilometers), and both were flying freely by 116 minutes after launch.

The 875-pound (397-kilogram) FLEX will detect and monitor vegetation fluorescence, which explains its name (a shortening of "Fluorescence Explorer"). By doing so, it will map plant photosynthetic activity — something no satellite can do at the moment, according to ESA.

FLEX's data will be important not only "for a better understanding of the global carbon cycle, but also for agricultural management and food security," ESA wrote in a FLEX mission desription. "This is of particular relevance due to demand the growing world population is placing on the production of food."

Sentinel-3C is part of the European Union's Copernicus Earth-observation program. The 2,520-pound (1,1143-kg) satellite will continue the Sentinel-3 line, which is aging but still going strong in low Earth orbit; Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B, which launched in 2016 and 2018, respectively, remain active.

"Like its two older siblings in orbit, Sentinel-3C carries a suite of cutting-edge instruments that measure systematically Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics," ESA wrote in a Sentinel-3C description. "It provides essential information in near-real time for ocean and weather forecasting."

The 115-foot-tall (35-meter-tall) Vega C debuted in July 2022 and had seven flights under its belt before today, six of them successful.

The rocket was developed by the European Space Agency and originally operated by the France-based company Arianespace. The Italian outfit Avio now runs the vehicle's liftoffs, however; today's launch was the second Avio has managed.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:35 p.m. ET with news of successful liftoff, then again at 1:10 a.m. ET with news of successful satellite deployment.

SpaceX lofted three telecom satellites to orbit today (Sept. 13) on a milestone mission for the company.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT), carrying the final three satellites for Luxembourg-based SES' O3b mPOWER constellation.

It was the 700th mission to date for SpaceX's Falcon rocket family, according to the company. That family first spread its wings in March 2006 when the Falcon 1 debuted. The Falcon 1 flew a total of five times, twice successfully, before giving way to the workhorse Falcon 9 in 2010. The Falcon 9 has conducted the vast majority of the family's flights; the only other member, the still-active Falcon Heavy, has launched 13 times to date.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth a little less than nine minutes after launch today, landing in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was the 29th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1080.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the O3b mPOWER trio to medium Earth orbit (MEO). The satellites were deployed as scheduled, being released at an altitude of 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) over a 14-minute span starting roughly 33.5 minutes after launch.

SES already operates 10 O3b mPOWER satellites in MEO. The spacecraft that went up today will complete the constellation, which is "purpose-built to deliver predictable low latency, exceptional throughput and unprecedented flexibility for industries where uptime isn’t optional," according to the company.

"It transforms how networks operate by pairing advanced software defined satellites with an intelligent ground and software ecosystem — ensuring guaranteed performance, even as global bandwidth demands surge," the company wrote.

The O3b mPOWER satellites, which are built by Boeing, weigh about 3,750 pounds (1,700 kilograms) apiece. SpaceX has launched all of them, on six Falcon 9 launches beginning in December 2022.

Today's launch was SpaceX's 107th orbital mission of the year. The Falcon 9 has performed 105 of those flights, with the Falcon Heavy conducting the other two.

SpaceX has also launched two suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket in 2026 and is gearing up for the third, which apparently will take the giant vehicle orbital for the first time.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Thursday (Sept. 10) at 11:28 p.m. EDT (0328 GMT and 3:28 p.m. local New Zealand time on Sept. 11).

The launched kicked off a mission the company called "Happily Ever Faster," which we know little about.

Rocket Lab did not livestream the mission or reveal who booked it, saying only that it aimed to loft "a single commercial satellite to a 500 km low Earth orbit." That did indeed happen successfully, the company announced via X about 80 minutes after launch.

Speculation has worked to fill the information vacuum, as it generally does. For example, some outside observers think "Happily Ever Faster" carried up a "Gen-3" satellite for the geospatial intelligence company BlackSky.

These spacecraft are powerful Earth observers, capable of resolving features as small as 14 inches (35 centimeters) on our planet's surface. Rocket Lab has launched BlackSky Gen-3 satellites before, so this is a pretty good bet — especially since, in that post-launch X post, the company revealed that the deployed payload was an Earth-observing craft.

"Happily Ever Faster" was Rocket Lab's 16th launch of 2026, and the 13th involving the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to space.

The company has also launched three missions this year with HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that tests customer equipment in a hypersonic flight environment. All 16 launches in 2026 have been successful.

SpaceX launched a secret mission for the U.S. Space Force today (Sept. 10) from California's central coast.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 11:42 a.m. EDT (1542 GMT; 8:42 a.m. local time), kicking off a mission called USSF-153.

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 27th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1801. The record for a SpaceX rocket is 37, set last month during a launch of the company's Starlink internet satellites.

USSF-153 is a classified mission, so little is known about its payloads — what they are or where exactly they're headed. We didn't get much clarity from the webcast, which ended shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage landed.

However, the location of that touchdown provided some potentially useful information about USSF-153, according to NextSpaceflight.com.

The mission might be carrying "a batch of classified LEO [low Earth orbit] satellites for a U.S. government entity based on SpaceX's Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches," the outlet wrote.

"Starshield leverages SpaceX's Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts," SpaceX wrote in a description of the Starshield program.

Today's launch was the 104th Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Eighty of the rocket's flights this year have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. ET on Sept. 10 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

SpaceX launched 27 more of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit today (Sept. 6).

The spacecraft rode to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT; 7:26 a.m. local California time). The Falcon 9 rose into blue morning skies — something of a rarity for California's central coast, which is often cloaked in fog.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was the 19th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1088. This marks about the halfway point to the SpaceX record of 37 flights, which was set by B1067 during a Starlink launch on Aug. 25.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, carried the 27 Starlink satellites to LEO, deploying them on schedule 62 minutes after launch.

Today's launch was the 103rd Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Eighty of those flights have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled. It currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

Starlink missions fly exclusively out of Vandenberg these days. SpaceX used to launch them from Florida as well, but the company recently put those missions on hold until it gets its Starship megarocket up and running on the Space Coast.

SpaceX will rely on Starship to launch its next-gen Starlink V3 satellites, which are bigger and more capable than the current V2. The company wants to assemble a network of about 100,000 Starlink V3s in LEO, Elon Musk has said.

The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today (Sept. 5) at 4:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT; 10:12 p.m. local time in Norway). A little over seven minutes later, it etched its name into the record books, settling into an elliptical path around our planet.

"This is right now making history — making history for Spectrum, making history for Isar, making history for Europe,” Nikolaos Perakis, Spectrum chief engineer at Isar, said during today's launch webcast, which the company produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight. "I'm incredibly proud of this massive achievement."

This was Spectrum's second bite at the apple: The two-stage, 95-foot-tall (28-meter-tall) rocket first flew in March 2025, lifting off from Andøya on a flight Isar called "Going Full Spectrum." But, as often happens on debut missions, Spectrum suffered an anomaly that day; it came crashing back to Earth less than a minute after launch.

"A comprehensive investigation was completed within two months of the launch," Isar wrote in a September 2025 update. "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve and a loss of attitude control at the start of the roll maneuver as the initiating events that led to the in-flight failure."

The company took the lessons learned that day and geared up for flight number two, "Onward and Upward," which was originally supposed to launch in January.

An issue with a pressurization valve nixed that plan, however, pushing the flight to March. Bad weather and an intruding boat scuttled multiple attempts that month, and an April 9 try was scrubbed due to a leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.

Isar next tried to fly on June 15 but stood down after "detecting off-nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a company update that day on X. But the company got that issue under control, rolling Spectrum back to the pad for today's launch.

"We had some delays, obviously," Petrakis said during the webcast. "We had some setbacks, but we came back stronger from them. And it validates this tremendous amount of engineering across all the teams, and that's what brings us into orbit."

Spectrum didn't carry viable payloads on its debut flight, but it did today: Five cubesats and one non-deployable scientific experiment went up on "Onward and Upward."

Spectrum's upper stage needed to deploy those payloads before Isar could declare full mission success. And deployment couldn't occur until after the rocket performed a circularization burn to get out of its initial elliptical orbit, which was estimated to feature a closest approach to Earth of 112 miles (180 kilometers) and a farthest-away point of 311 miles (500 km).

Spectrum was able to check those boxes, ultimately deploying the payloads as planned, Isar announced via X about two hours after launch.

So today was a very big day for Isar, which is thinking big with Spectrum. The company sees the rocket — which can haul about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit — becoming a workhorse launcher of small to medium-size satellites down the road, and its infrastructure supports that vision. Isar says its manufacturing facility near Munich can churn out more than 30 of the rockets per year.

“Flight 2 is a big, big milestone, big success," Petrakis said. "But this is just the beginning. So I'm really looking forward to the next steps."

Spectrum is the first rocket to reach orbit from Western Europe, but others have long flown from a different part of the continent — the Russian part. For example, Plesetsk Cosmodrome has hosted orbital launches for about six decades now. (About 25% of Russia lies in Europe, with the rest classified as part of Asia.)

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:45 p.m. ET with news of successful launch and orbital insertion, then again at 8:35 p.m. ET with news of payload deployment.

India notched a spaceflight milestone today (Sept. 3).

A GSLV Mark II rocket launched an Earth-imaging satellite toward geosynchronous orbit from Satish Dhawan Space Centre today at 5:25 p.m. EDT (2:55 a.m. on Sept. 4 India Standard Time).

The GSLV deployed the satellite, called EOS-05, into sub-geosynchronous transfer orbit about 18 minutes later as planned. The success marked a first for India, which had never hit that mark with an Earth-observing satellite before.

The GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) Mark II is a three-stage rocket that stands 170 feet (52 meters) tall. The vehicle debuted in 2010 and now has 13 flights under its belt to date, 11 of them successful. (Its predecessor, the GSLV Mark I, flew six times between 2001 and 2010, with two launch failures.)

On today's flight, the GSLV Mark II sent up EOS-05, a 5,218-pound (2367 kilograms) satellite designed to study our planet from a very high perch.

"EOS-05 is a state-of-the-art Earth observation spacecraft," Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) officials wrote in the press kit for today's launch. "It is India’s first-ever imaging satellite from geosynchronous orbit."

Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) up, where orbital speed matches Earth's rotational speed. Spacecraft at this altitude can therefore "hover" over a particular patch of our planet, making it a popular destination for weather, communications and spy satellites.

EOS-05's "ability to maintain persistent coverage could support monitoring of the Indian subcontinent, including remote border areas, strategic assets, severe weather and environmental events," The Economic Times wrote on Wednesday (Sept. 2). "The satellite is intended for both civilian and military applications."

India tried to get an Earth-observing satellite to GEO once before — in August 2021, when a GSLV Mark II launched the EOS-03 spacecraft. But the rocket experienced an anomaly with its third stage, and the satellite was lost.

The rocket bounced back from that failure in May 2023 and is now riding a streak of five consecutive successful launches.

Today's liftoff was the third orbital mission for India in 2026. The others were flown by ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which failed to deliver 16 satellites to orbit in January, and Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, which aced the nation's first-ever private orbital launch in July.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on Sept. 3 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

Another reusable Chinese rocket has taken to the skies.

Pallas-1, a launcher developed by the Beijing-based company Galactic Energy, flew for the first time ever on Monday (Aug. 31), lifting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT and 10 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 1).

Everything went well on the mission, according to Galactic Energy.

"The rocket successfully entered its predetermined orbit," the company said via social media on Monday about 30 minutes after liftoff (translation by Google). "This successful maiden flight marks Galactic Energy's official entry into a new development stage of combining solid and liquid propellants, driven by a dual-engine approach."

The company — which also operates Ceres-1, a small-satellite launcher with 23 flights under its belt to date — did not reveal what payloads, if any, Pallas-1 carried to orbit on Monday.

The two-stage Pallas-1 stands 171 feet (52 meters) tall and can haul about 15,400 pounds (7,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit. It will be one of Galactic Energy's "core models for the large-scale satellite constellation deployment and launch market," the company wrote in Monday's update.

Reuse is key to that vision. Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 features a reusable first stage, which Galactic Energy says is designed to fly at 25 times. Also like the Falcon 9, the Pallas-1 booster will steer its way to Earth with the aid of hypersonic "grid fins" and touch down on deployable landing legs.

There was no landing attempt on Monday's debut flight, however. Galactic Energy is targeting the second half of 2027 for that milestone, according to Space News.

Pallas-1 won't be the first Chinese rocket to land during an orbital mission. Two have already done so — the Long March 10B, whose first stage settled into a net carried by a ship at sea on July 10, and Zhuque-3, which came down on landing legs on Aug. 18.

Long March rockets are built by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, but Zhuque-3 was developed by the Beijing startup LandSpace. A number of other Chinese companies are working on partially reusable rockets as well, including CAS Space, Deep Blue Aerospace, iSpace, Orienspace and Space Pioneer.

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. See what's ahead for the BepiColombo mission here.

The BepiColombo mission is finally getting ready to arrive at its exotic destination.

BepiColombo launched in October 2018 and took a long, looping and highly circuitous route toward Mercury our solar system's innermost planet. That journey is now nearly over, and the mission is gearing up for arrival.

BepiColombo's two science orbiters — one run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the other by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — will separate from their power and propulsion module on Thursday (Sept. 3) at around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). You can watch that milestone live here at Space.com, courtesy of ESA, starting at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT).

ESA will pause the webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT), then resume it an hour later to cover the mission teams' acquisition of signals from the newly free-flying orbiters.

Those communications links are expected to be established no earlier than 9:53 a.m. EDT (1353 GMT), according to ESA officials. The webcast will chronicle that activity, as well as some spacecraft status checks, before ending between 10:15 and 10:45 a.m. EDT (1415 to 1445 GMT).

The separation is just the beginning of BepiColombo's Mercury-arrival phase. For example, the two science orbiters — ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or Mio) — won't be captured by the planet's gravity until Nov. 21.

The duo will still be linked up on that date. If all goes according to plan, MPO will release Mio into its final orbit — a highly elliptical one that gets as close as 367 miles (590 kilometers) to Mercury and as far away as 7,233 miles (11,640 km) — on Dec. 9 or Dec. 10, then start moving toward its own designated path a week later.

MPO is scheduled to reach its final orbit — an ellipse with altitude extremes of 298 miles and 932 miles (480 by 1,500 km) on March 10, 2027. The science phase of the BepiColombo mission (which is named after Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo) will begin on April 6.

That science work — performed over the course of at least one Earth year — should be intriguing and rewarding. MPO will map Mercury and Mio will study its magnetosphere, working together to shed light on "the least explored planet in the inner solar system," ESA officials wrote in a BepiColombo mission description.

"Among several investigations, BepiColombo will make a complete map of Mercury at different wavelengths," they added. "It will chart the planet's mineralogy and elemental composition, determine whether the interior of the planet is molten or not, and investigate the extent and origin of Mercury’s magnetic field."

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket can generate some serious thrust, leading to incredible displays of fireworks as seen in the photo above.

What is it?

In this photo, the 27 Merlin engines of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket spew fire as they generate the thrust that sent NASA's revolutionary Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to orbit on a picture-perfect morning launch on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026.

Falcon Heavy sent Roman to a gravitationally stable parking spot known as Lagrange Point 2, located 1 million miles away (1.5 million kilometers) between Earth and Mars, where the gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth equal out.

Once there, the Roman Space Telescope will spend a few months coming online before it begins conducting groundbreaking science, searching the universe for signs of dark energy and dark matter and hunting for distant exoplanets.

Why is it incredible?

SpaceX only pulls out Falcon Heavy when it needs incredible heavy-lift capability. The rocket essentially consists of three Falcon 9 rocket boosters attached to one another, whose combined 27 Merlin engines can generate over 5 million pounds (2.27 million kilograms) of thrust. That lift power enables Falcon Heavy to send large payloads to distant destinations.

Aside from Roman, other notable Falcon Heavy missions include the 2024 launch of the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter's icy moon, the Psyche probe that will investigate a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and most famously, a Tesla Roadster convertible featuring a mannequin 'driver'.