China's latest crewed mission made it to the Tiangong space station after a Friday (Oct. 31) launch from the Gobi Desert.

A Long March 2F rocket topped with the Shenzhou 21 spacecraft lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Friday at 11:44 a.m. EDT (1544 GMT, or 11:44 p.m. Beijing time).

The spacecraft docked with the front port of the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station on schedule around 3.5 hours after liftoff, adopting a fast automated rendezvous and docking mode that shaves around three hours off the time for the Shenzhou 20 mission.

Shenzhou 21 is carrying commander Zhang Lu, 48, a veteran of the 2022 Shenzhou 15 mission, and two rookie astronauts, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang, who were chosen from China's third batch of astronauts, selected in 2020.

"After two years, being able to once again represent my country and carry out the Shenzhou 21 mission fills me with excitement and anticipation;” Zhang Lu told reporters at a press conference at Jiuquan on Thursday (Oct. 30).

At 32 years old, Wu is the youngest member of China's astronaut corps, and was an engineer at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). Zhang, 39, is a payload specialist and a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Zhang Lu and his crewmates were greeted aboard the three-module Tiangong space station by Chen Dong, commander of the Shenzhou 20 mission, and his two crewmates, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie.

Chen Dong recently became the first Chinese astronaut to accumulate 400 days in orbit, but he and his crew will soon depart Tiangong; they're scheduled to touch down back on Earth on Nov. 3. Shenzhou 20 launched on April 24.

Shenzhou 21 is also carrying six types of experimental samples and four black mice for experiments related to reproduction in low Earth orbit. The robotic Tianzhou 10 cargo spacecraft is also scheduled to arrive at Tiangong during the six-month-long Shenzhou 21 mission.

The Shenzhou spacecraft is similar to, but also slightly larger than, Russia's Soyuz crew spacecraft. China is also developing the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, which will not only be partially reusable and serve Tiangong but also be capable of sending astronauts to the moon.

China has now launched 16 crewed missions. Shenzhou 21 is the 10th astronaut flight to Tiangong and the seventh since the completion of the three-module orbital outpost in late 2022.

The country aims to keep Tiangong, which is about 20% as massive as the International Space Station, permanently inhabited for at least a decade. China is also planning to expand the space station with new modules and considering opening the outpost to commercial activities.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 7:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 31 with news of Shenzhou 21's successful docking with the Tiangong space station.

China will launch three astronauts toward its Tiangong space station today (Oct. 31), and you can watch the action live.

A Long March 2F rocket is scheduled to launch the Shenzhou 21 mission from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert today at 11:44 a.m. EDT (1544 GMT; 11:44 p.m. Beijing Time).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of CCTV, or directly via the network.

Shenzhou 21 will send three astronauts — Zhang Lu, Zhang Hongzhang and Wu Fei — to China's Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit.

Zhang Lu, 48, will command the mission. He's an off-Earth veteran, having also flown to Tiangong on the Shenzhou 15 mission in November 2022. Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu, 32, will be making their spaceflight debuts.

Wu will make history today, becoming the youngest Chinese astronaut ever to reach space.

"As the youngest member of China's Astronaut Corps, I feel extremely fortunate to embark on my spaceflight mission," Wu said during a press conference at Jiuquan on Thursday (Oct. 30). "I owe my good fortune to the era we live in, which is seeing leapfrog development in China's aerospace industry."

The three astronauts will spend about six months aboard Tiangong — the usual stint for visitors to China's orbiting outpost.

They'll conduct a variety of scientific experiments during that stretch, including research with mice. That will be a first for China, which has never sent rodents to Tiangong before. The trio will also perform spacewalks and conduct public outreach activities, among other tasks.

Shenzhou 21 will be the 10th crewed flight to Tiangong, a three-module station that China finished building in October 2022. The mission will take over for Shenzhou 20, whose three astronauts are scheduled to come back to Earth on Nov. 3.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 4:41 p.m. EDT (2041 GMT; 1:41 p.m. local California time).

Starlink, SpaceX's internet-beaming network in low Earth orbit (LEO), is by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled. The company has lofted more than 10,000 Starlink spacecraft to date, and nearly 8,800 of them are active today.

Most of SpaceX's launches these days go toward building out Starlink even further: The company has flown 138 Falcon 9 missions so far in 2025, and 99 have been Starlink efforts.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after launch, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was the 29th flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1063. That's close to the Falcon 9 reuse record, which currently stands at 31 flights.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage will continue hauling the 29 Starlink satellites to LEO, where they'll be deployed about an hour after liftoff.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) declared its Akatsuki spacecraft dead on Tuesday (Oct. 28), more than a year after the Venus climate probe failed to respond to calls from mission control.

"This was a mission that changed our view of our Earth-sized neighbor, and laid the path for new discoveries about what it takes to become heaven or hell," JAXA officials stated of the mission, referring to the notoriously high-pressure and high-temperature surface of Venus in comparison to Earth.

JAXA noted that the Akatsuki mission produced 178 journal papers and counting, and that it tripled its 4.5-year design lifetime — even though the probe missed its first shot at orbiting Venus.

The $300 million spacecraft, also known as the Venus Climate Orbiter, launched in 2010 and experienced a failure of its main engine along the way, missing the chance for a crucial burn to enter orbit. Incredibly, however, the mission survived long enough for a second try at orbital insertion in 2015, when Akatsuki drew close to Venus after five years of orbiting the sun.

"With the main rocket engine damaged, the team were forced to get creative," JAXA wrote in the statement. "The spacecraft would have to attempt capture using the less powerful thrusters that were designed for the tasks of attitude control and fine adjustments. Orbit insertion had never previously been achieved with such a method, but exploration has always been about redefining the impossible."

Akatsuki not only made it but persisted in its exploration of Venus for nearly a decade. JAXA announced it had lost contact with the spacecraft on May 29, 2024 after about a month of communication issues.

Akatsuki aimed to learn more about the climate of Venus, which has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, alongside crushing pressure that has destroyed past landing missions in minutes. As an orbiter, Akatsuki focused on the cloud bank of Venus that is about 30 to 43 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) above the surface.

"In this region, winds whip at speeds that approach the Shinkansen bullet trains, 60 times faster than the planet rotation — a phenomenon that is known as 'super rotation,'" JAXA wrote. While Venusian clouds whip around the planet in about four Earth days on average, Venus' extremely slow rotation means a single Venusian day lasts the equivalent of 243 days on our planet.

Akatsuki made progress in learning about super rotation. "As Akatsuki gazed steadily at the Venusian surface, researchers mapped the clouds between hundreds of images, measuring their speed as they slid around the globe," JAXA stated. "This analysis revealed that the acceleration of the clouds depended on the local solar time, suggesting that the incredible rotation speeds were being maintained by solar heating."

The finding has implications for life beyond Earth, the agency added. Venus orbits the sun in just 225 days, a shorter duration than its rotation. This means the planet is nearly tidally locked, which would be the case if its surface perpetually had one hemisphere facing the sun (just like Earth's moon, whose near side constantly faces our planet.)

"Many of the extrasolar planets discovered may be in tidal lock, and there is an ongoing debate as to whether this impedes their chances of habitability," JAXA wrote. "Without a mechanism to redistribute heat, air on the nightside of a tidally locked world would freeze and cause global atmospheric collapse. However, if Venus's rapid atmosphere rotation is driven by thermal input from the star, then this could be a common mechanism that would redistribute the heat fast enough on tidally locked worlds to save their air."

Akatsuki initially launched with six instruments, all of which were still working when it entered the orbit of Venus in 2015. Two infrared cameras stopped working about a year after orbital insertion, but the last four instruments were believed to still be healthy when Akatsuki stopped communicating in 2024.

The mission made some other discoveries as well, JAXA said. Scientists spotted a bow-like feature in the atmosphere that lasted for at least four Earth days, which researchers suggested was due to mountains on Venus allowing lower-atmosphere gas to move higher as a "gravity wave" to a greater extent than observed on Earth. But learning more will require new Venus missions, JAXA said.

And there are some in the planning stages. For example, NASA is working on a mission called DAVINCI, which is designed to penetrate the atmosphere, and another one called VERITAS, which will orbit the planet in search of information about its surface and interior. And the European Space Agency is developing EnVision, an orbiter that will study the atmosphere, interior and surface of Venus.

Both DAVINCI and VERITAS, however, are at threat of losing funding in President Donald Trump's 2026 NASA budget request, which slashes agency funding by 24% and cancels dozens of science missions. What happens next is still being debated by politicians during the ongoing U.S. government shutdown that started on Oct. 1, when funding was not agreed to for the new fiscal year.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 12:35 a.m. EDT (1635 GMT).

The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, pulling off a pinpoint touchdown in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Just Read the Instructions."

It was the 15th flight for this particular booster, which carries the designation 1082, and some of its previous missions were pretty high-profile. For example, this same first stage also launched the Crew-8 astronaut mission to the International Space Station for NASA and Polaris Dawn, a crewed flight to Earth orbit that featured the first-ever private spacewalk.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 29 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit today. They'll be deployed there about 64 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan.

Today's liftoff was the 138th orbital launch of the year for SpaceX, extending the company's cadence record. The previous mark was 134, set in 2024.

Ninety-nine of this year's missions have been devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 8,700 active satellites.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 28 Starlink craft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 8:43 p.m. EDT (5:43 p.m. local California time; 0043 GMT on Oct. 28).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 17th flight for this particular booster, which carries the designation 1082.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the 28 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO), where they will be deployed about an hour after launch.

Today's launch was the 137th Falcon 9 mission of the year and the third in the last three days. Ninety-eight of those flights have been devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

SpaceX has launched more than 10,000 Starlink spacecraft to date, and nearly 8,750 of them remain active in LEO. The megaconstellation will get considerably bigger, however, adding perhaps another 30,000 satellites or so over the coming years.

SpaceX extends its single-year launch record with every liftoff these days. The company's previous mark for orbital launches was 134, set in 2024.

One of the company's Falcon 9 rockets lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Oct. 25) at 10:20 a.m. EDT (1420 GMT; 7:20 a.m. local time), carrying 28 Starlink internet satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 135th orbital launch of the year for SpaceX, breaking a mark the company set in 2024.

All of SpaceX's orbital flights this year have been performed by Falcon 9s, which have now launched as many missions in the past 11 months as NASA's space shuttle flew in its 30-year history.

SpaceX has also launched five suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket so far this year. In 2024, the company launched 132 Falcon 9 missions, two flights of the more powerful Falcon Heavy, and four Starship suborbital tests.

On today's flight, the Falcon 9 came back to Earth as planned, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the 19th launch and touchdown for this particular booster, which is designated 1081.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 28 Starlink satellites toward LEO, where they will be deployed about an hour after liftoff.

SpaceX has notched a number of important milestones in the past week or so. For example, one recent mission launched the 10,000th Starlink satellite to orbit, and another was the record-breaking 31st flight of the Falcon 9 booster known as 1067.

And the Oct. 23 launch of the Spainsat NG-2 satellite was the 139th overall liftoff of the year for SpaceX, also a new record.

Japan's new HTV-X cargo spacecraft launched on its first-ever mission to the International Space Station on Saturday (Oct. 25).

The robotic HTV-X lifted off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT and 9 a.m local Japan time on Oct. 26).

It is expected to arrive at the station for its capture and berthing on Wednesday (Oct. 29) at about 11:50 a.m. EDT (1550 GMT).

The HTV-X is the successor to JAXA's H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), also known as Kounotori (Japanese for "White Stork"), which flew nine missions to the International Space Station (ISS) between September 2009 and May 2020.

At 26.2 feet (8 meters) long, the new freighter is about 4 feet (1.2 m) shorter than its predecessor, but it can loft roughly the same payload mass to low Earth orbit (about 13,200 pounds, or 6,000 kilograms). The HTV-X also offers other advantages.

"HTV-X enhances transportation capabilities and adds the capability to provide various users with on-orbit demonstration opportunities for up to 1.5 years after leaving ISS until reentry," Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which builds the HTV-X for JAXA, wrote in a description of the vehicle.

The HTV-X's potential uses also extend beyond the ISS, according to JAXA. The agency envisions it aiding "post-ISS human space activities in low Earth orbit" as well as possibly flying cargo to Gateway, the space station NASA may build in lunar orbit as part of its Artemis program.

HTV-X's debut increases the stable of ISS cargo craft by one-third. The currently operational freighters are Russia's Progress vehicle and Cygnus and Dragon, spacecraft built by the American companies Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, respectively. Only Dragon is reusable; the others (including HTV-X) are designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their missions are over.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:15 p.m. ET on Oct. 25 with news of successful liftoff.

Gilmour Space launched its first Eris rocket on July 29 from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in coastal Queensland, but the rocket fell to Earth just 14 seconds after liftoff.

Despite the setback, the TestFlight1 mission laid the foundation for sovereign launch from Australian soil, according to Adam Gilmour, CEO and co-founder of Gilmour Space Technologies, speaking at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 3.

"We had 14 seconds of flight time, 23 seconds of engine burn time. And we have obviously gotten a lot of data out of it, a lot of information, and we were pretty happy with it," Gilmour said. He added that, on average, it takes a rocket company an average of three launch attempts to get to orbit successfully.

Behind July's brief flight lay years of groundwork. The journey to the pad involved challenges and hurdles in terms of engineering, financing, regulations and licensing — including 24 different permits from Queensland, along with environmental and airspace approvals — as well as finding a location for a launch pad.

"We drove 2,000 kilometers [1,240 miles] out into the middle of Australia, into an area that I think is very similar to what the surface of Mars looks like," Gilmour said. "When we did the launch, a lot of the media said Gilmour launched a rocket in a cow paddock. I got offended — but then you go down there, and you do see cows."

Now, with infrastructure in place, and having worked with regulators, the company is plotting its return to flight for 2026.

"We are going to be launching again next year," Gilmour said. "We're going to be doing more launch attempts, so we're not going to give up."

This, he added, is the start of what could be a bright future for the Australian space sector. "I think the future looks fantastic … If you look at all the building blocks of what the country's done, we now have rules and regulations that permit orbital launches.

"I think there's at least four or five companies in Australia that have satellites operationally working in space, which is really, really good," Gilmour said. "And we are well capitalized. So I think in the next five years, you're going to see more launches out of Australia."

SpaceX launched its record-setting 139th mission of the year today (Oct. 23).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 9:30 p.m. EDT (0130 GMT on Oct. 24), lofting the second and final satellite for the Spainsat Next Generation (NG) constellation.

The two Spainsat NG spacecraft will provide "military-grade secure communications to the Spanish Armed Forces and its partners," according to SatNews.

SpaceX also launched the first Spainsat NG satellite, which lifted off atop a Falcon 9 this past January.

If all goes to plan today, the Falcon 9's upper stage will deploy the Spainsat NG-2 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit about 36 minutes after liftoff.

The rocket's first stage, meanwhile, did not come back to Earth for a safe touchdown today — a rarity these days for Falcon 9 missions. The booster was in expendable mode "due to the additional performance required to deliver this payload to orbit," SpaceX wrote in a mission description.

This mission was the 22nd for this booster, the company added.

Today's flight was the 139th of 2025 for SpaceX, setting a new mark for the company. SpaceX has now launched 134 Falcon 9 missions this year — also a record — and five suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket.

In 2024, SpaceX performed 132 Falcon 9 flights, four Starship test launches and two liftoffs of its powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:45 p.m. ET on Oct. 23 with news of successful launch.

SpaceX has broken its own record for number of rocket launches in a year, and is showing no signs of slowing down.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 28 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Oct. 22) at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT; 7:16 a.m. local California time). It was the 133rd Falcon 9 flight of 2025, breaking the mark set by the rocket last year.

The satellites will add to SpaceX's growing megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which provides wireless internet services to Starlink customer's across the globe.

Today's launch will be the 138th overall of 2025 for SpaceX, tying the record the company set in 2024.

Last year, SpaceX launched 132 Falcon 9 flights, two missions of the more powerful Falcon Heavy and four suborbital trials of its Starship megarocket. The Falcon Heavy has not flown yet in 2025; SpaceX's other five missions this year have been Starship test flights.

Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was be the 21st launch and touchdown for this particular booster, which is designated B1075. The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, will continue carrying the Starlink satellites to LEO, deploying them there an hour after launch.

Today's launch will be the latest in a series of milestones that SpaceX has notched recently. For example, the company launched two Falcon 9 missions on Sunday (Oct. 19); one sent the 10,000th Starlink satellite to LEO, and the other was the record-breaking 31st flight for that particular Falcon 9's first stage.

China's first reusable rocket just took a big step toward flight.

The Chinese company LandSpace conducted a static-fire test with its stainless steel Zhuque-3 launcher on Monday (Oct. 20), keeping the rocket on track for a debut expected to occur before the end of the year.

The static fire — a common prelaunch trial in which a rocket fires its engines while remaining anchored to the pad — capped the three-day "first phase" of Zhuque-3's maiden flight campaign, according to LandSpace.

That phase also included a fueling test, which, like the static fire, took place in the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in northwestern China.

"The vehicle will next proceed with planned vertical integration rehearsal, before returning to the technical zone for inspection and maintenance in preparation for its upcoming orbital launch and first-stage recovery," LandSpace said via X on Monday.

Zhuque-3 looks a lot like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which also features a reusable first stage and an expendable upper stage. Like the Falcon 9, Zhuque-3's booster is powered by nine engines — in this case, Tianque-12As, which LandSpace developed in house.

The Tianque-12A employs liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellants — a key difference with the Falcon 9, whose Merlin engines burn LOX and rocket-grade kerosene. (SpaceX's next-gen Raptor engine, which powers its Starship megarocket, uses LOX and liquid methane.)

The 217-foot-tall (66 meters) Zhuque-3 can haul about 40,350 pounds (18,300 kilograms) to low Earth orbit (LEO). That's in roughly the same ballpark as the Falcon 9, whose LEO payload capacity is 50,265 pounds (22,800 kg).

Monday's static fire was the latest in a series of significant milestones for the Zhuque-3. For example, LandSpace performed low-altitude launch and landing tests with the vehicle last year, and it conducted a static fire this past June.

Beijing-based LandSpace, which was founded in 2015, also flies the expendable Zhuque-2. In July 2023, that rocket became the first LOX-methane vehicle to reach Earth orbit. That debut kicked off a string of four consecutive successes for Zhuque-2, but the rocket failed on its most recent liftoff this past August.

On Saturday (Oct. 18), mine workers found a mysterious smoking slab sitting near a remote access road some 19 miles (30 kilometers) east of Newman, Western Australia. The Western Australia Police Force visited the site and took note of the incident, as did the Australian Space Agency, which explained that it will carry out "further technical analysis to identify its origin."

But an early look at the mysterious debris suggests that it is made of carbon fiber, and is perhaps part of a rocket.

In a blog post on Monday (Oct. 20), space analyst Marco Langbroek said that the object resembles a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV). COPVs hold high-pressure gases and liquids inside rockets and often survive reentry through Earth's atmosphere.

"It reportedly was burning when found, which is unusual and against expectations for space debris," Langbroek wrote in Monday's update. This suggests a very recent impact, if it was indeed space junk, he added.

Langbroek thinks it likely is orbital debris, and he named a promising source candidate — the upper stage of a Chinese Jielong 3 (also known as Smart Dragon 3) rocket, which fell back to Earth on Oct. 18.

"It could actually be (a significant part of) the upper stage itself, given the large size that the photos suggest (and also given that the Jielong 3 upper stage is reportedly a solid fuel stage)," wrote Langbroek, a specialist on astrodynamics and space missions who's on the faculty of aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

He sifted through a handful of candidate space objects that could be tied to the detritus.

"Of these, only one was in an orbit that would match passing close to Newman in the early hours of October 18, the Chinese Jielong 3 stage in a 97.6 degree inclined polar orbit," he wrote. He added that the rocket stage approached from the north-northeast moving toward the south-southwest.

"Not much information is known about the Jielong 3 components in terms of size and mass," Langbroek stated, but he stressed that this object is a good contender for the source of the Outback object.

SpaceX notched a big milestone on a Falcon 9 rocket launch today (Oct. 19).

A Falcon 9 carrying 28 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 1:39 p.m. EDT (1639 GMT).

It was the record-breaking 31st mission for this Falcon 9's first stage, a booster designated 1067.

Booster 1067 came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff as planned today, wrapping up its 31st flight with a pinpoint landing in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas."

Such extensive rocket reuse is a core part of SpaceX's plan to lower the cost of spaceflight and increase its efficiency.

That already-successful strategy could take a big leap forward soon; the company is developing a giant, fully reusable rocket called Starship, which is designed to help humanity settle Mars. (The Falcon 9 and its close cousin the Falcon Heavy are only partially reusable; their upper stages are expendable.)

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, hauled the 28 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit today, deploying them as planned about 64 minutes after launch.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:49 p.m. EDT on Oct. 19 with news of successful launch and rocket landing. It was updated again at 5 p.m. ET with news of satellite deploy, and to correct an earlier version that claimed that this flight lofted the 10,000th Starlink satellite to space. That milestone actually came on SpaceX's second Starlink launch of the day, which launched from California.

SpaceX notched two big milestones on a single Falcon 9 liftoff today (Oct. 19).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink internet satellites lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 3:24 p.m. EDT (1924 GMT; 12:24 p.m. local California time).

Those 28 included the 10,000th Starlink spacecraft ever to reach orbit, which a SpaceX employee noted on the company's launch webcast: "From Tintin to 10,000! Go Starlink, go Falcon, go SpaceX!"

It was also the 132nd Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, equaling the mark set by the rocket last year — and there are still nearly 2.5 months to go in 2025.

SpaceX launched its first two Starlink prototypes — known as Tintin A and Tintin B — to low Earth orbit (LEO) in February 2018, then began building the megaconstellation in earnest 15 months later. The company offered Starlink service for the first time with a public beta test in October 2020 and started a commercial rollout the next year.

Starlink now provides service to millions of customers around the world, and SpaceX continues to beef up that product by sending more and more satellites to the final frontier.

The pace has reached extraordinary levels lately: SpaceX launched 89 Starlink missions in 2024 and has already exceeded that number this year. And don't expect it to stop anytime soon: SpaceX already has permission to loft 12,000 Starlink satellites, and the megaconstellation could eventually consist of more than 30,000 spacecraft.

Most of the Starlink satellites that SpaceX has launched remain active — 8,608 are currently operational, according to satellite tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Most of the others have been deorbited, guided down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere. (Each Starlink satellite has an operational life of about five years.)

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned today about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 11th launch and touchdown for this particular booster, which carries the designation 1088.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, deployed the Starlink satellites on schedule an hour after liftoff.

This launch was the second of the day for SpaceX; less than two hours earlier, another Falcon 9 sent 28 more Starlink satellites up from Florida's Space Coast. That earlier liftoff was the 31st for that Falcon 9's first stage, setting a new reuse record.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:35 p.m. ET on Oct. 19 with news of successful launch and rocket landing, then again at 5:05 p.m. ET with news of satellite deploy and to note that this mission carried the 10,000th Starlink satellite to reach orbit.

On Oct. 10, the Department of the Air Force approved SpaceX's proposal to launch up to 100 missions annually from Vandenberg Space Force Base, which sits on the Golden State's rugged, beautiful and cloudy central coast.

SpaceX had been cleared to launch just 50 times per year from the site.

The newly announced record of decision (ROD) came after the Air Force released a final environmental impact statement about SpaceX's proposed ramp-up of activities at Vandenberg.

To date, the only SpaceX rocket that has ever flown from Vandenberg is the company's workhorse Falcon 9 — and all of its liftoffs there have been from Space Launch Complex 4-East (SLC-4E).

But the Air Force approval opens Vandenberg to launches of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy as well, from Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6). That pad has not hosted a liftoff since 2022; it will be modified to support both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions, according to an Air Force statement issued on Tuesday (Oct. 14).

The newly granted approval authorizes up to five Falcon Heavy launches per year from SLC-6. But the heavy lifter likely won't actually use 5% of SpaceX's 100-flight quota; the Falcon Heavy hasn't flown in over a year, and SpaceX is working to get an even more powerful rocket online — Starship, a giant, fully reusable vehicle designed to help humanity settle Mars.

The Air Force approval is not the final word on the matter, however. The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial launches, "will issue an independent ROD based on its conclusions," Air Force officials wrote in Tuesday's statement.

SpaceX currently launches rockets from four sites — Vandenberg, Starbase in South Texas, and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which are next door to each other on Florida's Space Coast.

Starbase is the center of Starship manufacturing and testing; it has hosted all 11 of the megarocket's test flights to date. Vandenberg generally supports launches to polar orbits, which are popular for Earth-observation missions. Because Earth rotates in a west-to-east direction, satellites that circle it from north to south eventually see almost all of the planet's surface.

China's Long March rocket family now has 600 flights under its belt.

A Long March 8A lifted off on Wednesday (Oct. 15) from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan at 9:33 p.m. EDT (0133 GMT and 9:33 a.m. local time on Oct. 16).

The mission, which successfully lofted a batch of satellites for the Guowang broadband network, was the 600th ever for a Long March rocket.

The first Long March liftoff occurred on April 24, 1970, when a Long March 1 sent China's first satellite, called Dong Fang Hong 1, to orbit.

Over the ensuing 55 years, the nation has developed more than 20 different types of Long March rockets, 16 of which are active today, according to China Daily. And China's launch cadence has accelerated considerably over that span.

"It took 37 years for the Long March family to complete its first 100 launches," China Daily wrote on Thursday (Oct. 16). "The second 100 were achieved in 7.5 years. The third 100 launches took just over four years, the fourth 100 took two years and nine months, and the fifth 100 missions were completed in two years. The most recent 100 launches were accomplished in one year and 10 months."

The fleet's success rate overall is about 97%, the outlet added.

The Long March isn't the most-flown rocket family of all time; that distinction goes to the Soviet/Russian Soyuz line, which has completed more than 1,700 missions since debuting in November 1966.

The Soviet Union's Kosmos family and the American Atlas series have hit the 600 mark as well. And SpaceX's Falcon line, consisting of the Falcon 1 (which was retired in 2009), Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, will get there soon. Falcons have flown more than 570 times to date, and they're rocketing off the pad at unprecedented rates; SpaceX has already conducted 130 Falcon 9 launches so far this year alone.

Guowang ("national network") is a nascent broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) that will be operated by the state-run company China Satnet. The network will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites, if all goes to plan.

Wednesday's launch lofted the 12th group of Guowang satellites. Each batch is thought to consist of eight to 10 spacecraft.

Another Chinese internet constellation, called Qianfan ("Thousand Sails"), will have about the same number of spacecraft. Both networks are following in the footsteps of SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 8,600 operational spacecraft and is growing all the time. (About 70% of this year's Falcon 9 launches have been Starlink missions.)

Spectacular footage from Starship's recent test launch shows the final seconds of the spacecraft's booster before touching down in the rich, blue waters of the Gulf.

SpaceX launched the 11th test flight of its giant Starship rocket on Oct. 12 and achieved all of its objectives. The vehicle, currently under development, consists of its "Ship" upper stage, and the Super Heavy booster, both of which are reusable. Together, they stand nearly 400 feet tall (122 meters), though SpaceX plans to launch a taller, upgraded version three (V3) iteration of the vehicle moving forward.

Starship V2, which launched Monday (Oct. 13) from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, has plagued the company over the past year of test flights, but Flight Test 11 and its predecessor have redeemed the rocket in its final flights. To drive that point home, SpaceX has released video from the booster's thrilling last moments before it dived into its new home at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Flight Test 11 achieved all of its mission goals, and SpaceX seemed to have improved issues seen on Flight Test 10, which saw visible structural damage on Ship as the upper stage returned through Earth's atmosphere.

Ship's descent and soft landing in the Indian Ocean created a picture perfect curtain call to wrap up V2's final flight about an hour after its liftoff, but its Super Heavy booster sang its swan song only about 6.5 minutes into the mission. This was the second flight of this particular Super Heavy booster, and only the second booster to be reflown as part of SpaceX's efforts to make Starship completely reusable.

Starship is the rocket SpaceX envisions will establish a permanent human presence on Mars — an effort company CEO Elon Musk estimates will take over a thousand launches, and one reliant on the vehicle's ability to land and launch again and again.

NASA has also tapped Starship as the lunar lander for the agency's upcoming Artemis 3 mission, which aims to put astronauts' boots on the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s. NASA hopes to launch that mission sometime in 2027, putting pressure on SpaceX's timeline to make Starship operationally ready.

In addition of the soft splashdowns of Ship and Super Heavy, Flight 11's success included deployment of Starlink mass simulator satellites, a relighting of Ship's Raptor engines while in space and a new engine burn initiation sequence for Super Heavy during the booster's deceleration and landing burn.

Both Super Heavy and Ship are designed to return to Starbase for quick turnarounds to reflight, though neither stage did so for this mission. SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times using giant mechanical arms attached to the rocket's launch tower, referred to as the "Mechazilla" chopstick arms. The Ship upper stage is also designed to be caught by the launch tower's arms, though Musk has stated SpaceX's first attempt to do so will take place in early 2026.

A squat and brawny Chinese rocket just aced its second-ever liftoff.

Orienspace's Gravity-1, the world's most powerful solid-fuel rocket, launched from the deck of a ship in the Yellow Sea on Oct. 10 at 10:20 p.m. EDT (0420 GMT and 10:20 a.m. Beijing time on Oct. 11).

The dramatic liftoff, which was caught on video, sent two huge plumes of exhaust into the hazy sky.

The 100-foot-tall (30-meter-tall) Gravity-1 consists of three stages and four strap-on boosters, all of which employ solid-fuel rocket motors. The vehicle is capable of lofting about 14,300 pounds (6,500 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Oct. 10 launch was successful, sending one wide-field satellite and two experimental spacecraft to their designated orbits, according to the state-run Chinese broadcaster CCTV.

Gravity-1 also lofted some satellites — three Yunyao-1 commercial weather spacecraft — on its first flight, which launched in January 2024 from the deck of this same barge.

Orienspace is developing two larger and more powerful rockets, known as Gravity-2 and Gravity-3.

Gravity-2 will feature a liquid-fuel core stage and solid rocket boosters as well as be capable of sending about 25.6 tons to LEO, Andrew Jones reported in SpaceNews last year.

Gravity-3 will employ three Gravity-2 core stages, much as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket uses three strapped-together Falcon 9 boosters, according to Jones. Gravity-3's payload capacity will be about 5 tons greater than that of Gravity-2.

Europe's next planet-hunting spacecraft just spread its "wings" in preparation for launch.

PLATO's twin solar panels, which will power the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars spacecraft's search for Earth-like exoplanets, spread out successfully during engineering tests last month in a European Space Agency (ESA) clean lab.

That's a big deal, as "PLATO is on track for the final key tests to confirm that it is fit for launch," ESA officials wrote in a statement Thursday (Oct. 9). If all goes to plan, PLATO will fly to space in December on board an Arianespace Ariane 6 rocket to search for strange new worlds.

The 4-billion-Euro ($4.62-billion USD) mission is being put through its paces in a Netherlands clean room, after engineers bolted together the back of the spacecraft with a module combining the sunshield and solar panels. As the panels collect power to generate electricity, the sunshield will shadow the scientific equipment prone to overheating in the sun's glare.

Since the panels need to wrap up tight to the spacecraft during launch before spreading in space, engineers tested the panels' deployment in the lab to make sure all was well. Like wings, the left and the right side were carefully unfurled in separate tests on Sept. 16 and Sept. 22, respectively.

"The deployment test must be carried out as if gravity were absent, and the panels were weightless," ESA officials wrote. "For this, the panels were suspended from a supporting frame, with a system of pulleys that moved along as the panels smoothly unfolded."

Engineers then verified the power was working by using a "special lamp to simulate the effect of sunlight." Next up comes prelaunch testing: shaking and noise-blasting PLATO to simulate the rocket's liftoff, and then putting the spacecraft in a large chamber to simulate the vacuum of space.

Once PLATO gets through launch and its commissioning tests, next comes a long search for other Earths. It will use 26 cameras to gaze at more than 150,000 bright strs simultaneously, seeking small changes in starlight. The goal is to catch exoplanets slightly dimming their parent stars' brightness as the little worlds pass across the face of these stars.

"To achieve the necessary high sensitivity, the cameras must be kept cool, so that each camera is kept at its best-focus temperature around -80 degrees Celsius [-112 degrees Fahrenheit]," ESA officials wrote.

PLATO is slated to last at least four years according to a mission website, although the observatory could persist longer with funding and a healthy spacecraft.

A Falcon 9 topped with 28 of the company's Starlink internet satellites launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today (Oct. 16), rising off the pad at 5:57 a.m. EDT (0957 GMT).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Just Read The Instructions."

It was the third launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated B1095. Its other two flights were also Starlink launches, according to a SpaceX mission description.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 28 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO), where they're scheduled to be deployed 64 minutes after liftoff.

Today's launch was the 130th Falcon 9 flight of 2025 already. That's just two shy of the rocket's single-year record, which was set in 2024.

More than 70% of this year's Falcon 9 launches have been devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 8,600 operational satellites.

SpaceX has five other launches under its belt this year as well — test flights of its Starship megarocket, which the company is developing to take people to the moon and Mars. The most recent Starship mission launched on Monday (Oct. 13) and was a complete success.

Epic new video from this week's Starship launch show's the giant spacecraft's final moments just before it splashed down in the Indian ocean.

Starship lifted off on its eleventh test flight Monday, Oct. 13, from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas. It was the final launch of the current, 397-foot-tall (121-meter-tall) version of the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage; a taller variant is set to debut on Starship flight 12.

Similar to Starship's tenth flight, Flight Test 11 was a complete success, and even fared better than its predecessor, which took more physical damage during its descent back through Earth's atmosphere. SpaceX posted new footage from Monday's mission that makes that even clearer, showing significantly less distress to the vehicle, compared to Flight 10, and far less discoloration to the spacecraft's heatshield.

Flight Test 11 achieved all of its mission goals, from launch to booster descent and splashdown in the Gulf, and Ship's successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean. It was the second launch for the flight's Super Heavy booster. It's also the second test flight in a row that Starship has accomplished all SpaceX hoped it would, and a positive step forward in the rocket's development.

The spacecraft managed, once again, to deploy a stack of eight simulated Starlink satellites, and successfully initiated a Raptor engine relight while in space. But this week's launch diverted from Flight 10's mission profile with variations in some of the vehicle's engine burn profiles — performed in preparation for the rocket's upgraded version 3.

The upper stage's landing burn, especially, differed from its previous flight, and this time mimicked the approach it will need for a return to its launch site, where the rocket's launch tower is designed to catch and secure Starship during its landing burn midair.

SpaceX cameras secured to drones and buoys captured Starship's descent through the clouds in crystal clear detail. The video tracks the vehicle as it initiated its novel flip-and-burn landing maneuver that transitions Starship from a 'bellyflop' position to an upright orientation, as its engines oriented the vehicle and slowed its momentum.

SpaceX launched 21 satellites for an advanced new U.S. military constellation this evening (Oct. 15).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 7:06 p.m. EDT (2306 GMT; 4:06 p.m. local California time), on a mission for the Space Development Agency (SDA).

The launch helps build out the SDA's Tranche 1 Transport Layer (T1TL), a network of 126 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that "will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe," agency officials wrote in a explainer.

Today's mission was SpaceX's second T1TL launch. The first, which occurred on Sept. 10, also sent 21 satellites up from Vandenberg aboard a Falcon 9.

Colorado-based company York Space Systems built those spacecraft. The satellites that launched today, however, were manufactured by aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

Northrop Grumman also scored an SDA contract for T1TL satellites. Each of these three companies will provide 42 spacecraft for the nascent constellation.

T1TL will be part of a larger LEO constellation, hundreds of satellites strong, that the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).

The PWSA satellites will be spread across seven "layers" — battle management, custody, deterrence, navigation, (missile) tracking, transport and support. This broad network will be refreshed every two years, keeping the SDA's space assets agile and up to date.

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

It was the seventh launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated B1093. It also launched SpaceX's first T1TL mission on Sept. 10, as well as five flights carrying the company's Starlink broadband satellites.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the 21 satellites to LEO. It's unclear when and exactly where they will be deployed today; SpaceX's mission description doesn't provide that information, likely at the request of the SDA.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 7:15 p.m. ET on Oct. 15 with news of successful launch and booster landing.

On Monday (Oct. 13), SpaceX launched the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, sending the 403-foot-tall (124 meters) vehicle aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas.

The suborbital flight was a complete success. Both of Starship's elements — its Super Heavy booster and Starship (or "Ship" for short) upper stage — came back to Earth for pinpoint splashdowns. Ship also managed to relight one of its engines in space and deploy eight dummy payloads.

Flight 11 was a big moment for the Starship program, and not just because everything went so well. It was also a swan song, the final liftoff of the vehicle's "Version 2" variant.

"Focus now turns to the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy, with multiple vehicles currently in active build and preparing for tests," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 wrap-up post.

"This next iteration will be used for the first Starship orbital flights, operational payload missions, propellant transfer and more as we iterate to a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle with service to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond," the company added.

That next iteration is Starship Version 3, which will be about 5 feet (1.5 m) taller than its predecessor. V3 will look a lot like V2, but there will be big differences "under the hood," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the Flight 11 launch webcast on Monday.

For example, the V3 Ship's propulsion system has been overhauled to accommodate Raptor 3, a new, brawnier version of the engine that powers both of Starship's stages. (Super Heavy has 33 Raptors and Ship has six.)

"We're also getting energy storage upgrades, tons of avionics changes — a lot of things that will enable longer-duration missions," Huot said.

"One notable thing you'll start seeing on the outside are these new docking adapters, which we'll use when we bring two Starships together for propellant transfer," he added. "That's a core capability of Starship that we're going to demonstrate next year."

Indeed, in-space fuel transfer is a crucial part of any Starship deep-space mission. Ship upper stages bound for the moon or Mars will launch with a minimum amount of propellant onboard (to save mass for payloads) and will therefore need to meet up with multiple "tanker" ships in Earth orbit to fuel up.

The V3 Super Heavy, meanwhile, features a redesigned fuel transfer tube, a giant metallic structure that channels cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen down to the booster's Raptor engines.

"New boosters are also going to have an integrated hot stage, a lot more vent area, and it's designed to be fully reusable," Huot said. (The hot stage marks the junction of Super Heavy and Ship; the "hot" part refers to the fact that Ship begins firing its engines before it has fully separated from the booster.)

The V3 Super Heavy will also have just three grid fins — the waffle-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for pinpoint touchdowns — instead of V2's four.

"They're 50% larger, though — much higher strength," Huot said. "They're also going to get used for vehicle lift and catch."

The lifting and catching will be done by the Starship launch tower's "chopstick" arms. These arms lift Ship and Super Heavy onto the launch mount, and they'll also catch both vehicles when they come back home after liftoff. (SpaceX has performed three such chopstick catches with Super Heavy to date but has not yet tried it with Ship.)

All 11 Starship test flights have lifted off from Starbase's Orbital Launch Mount 1. That pad will go on hiatus for a spell, however, as it's overhauled to accommodate Starship V3.

"Among many other things, we're installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system and upgrading the chopsticks for future catches," Jake Berkowitz, a SpaceX lead propulsion engineer, said during Monday's launch webcast. "So until that's complete, we'll be running launches from Pad 2, which will be online very soon."

Starship V3 will be capable of flying to Mars and may well do so next year, if testing continues to go well: SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company would like to launch a small fleet of uncrewed Starships to the Red Planet during the next opportunity, which comes in late 2026. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)

Over the long haul, however, SpaceX plans to rely on an even bigger and more powerful Starship — one that stands a whopping 466 feet (142 m) tall and sports 42 Raptors instead of the current 39. This V4 iteration is expected to debut in 2027, Musk has said.

2027 could be a landmark year, for both SpaceX and NASA. It's when the agency aims to launch its Artemis 3 mission, which will land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. The lunar lander for that epic mission will be a Starship upper stage.

Rocket Lab launched a radar satellite for Synspective today (Oct. 14), the seventh spacecraft it has lofted for the Japanese Earth-observation company to date.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 12:33 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT; 5:33a.m. Oct. 15 local New Zealand time), on a mission called "Owl New World."

The name is a reference to the payload — one of Synspective's Strix radar-imaging satellites. (Strix is a genus of owls.)

This particular spacecraft is "the first of a new generation of satellites by Synspective for its low Earth orbit constellation that provides high-frequency, high-resolution Earth observation data for disaster response and management, national security and environmental monitoring," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description, which you can find here.

This Strix satellite has a particularly wide frame, which spurred Rocket Lab to build a custom "arrowhead" payload fairing to accommodate it.

All went according to plan on today's launch, according to Rocket Lab: Electron deployed the Strix satellite 362 miles (583 kilometers) above Earth just over 50 minutes after launch, right on schedule.

Seven Strix satellites have reached the final frontier to date, on seven different Electron flights. All of these missions have had "owl" names: "The Owl's Night Begins," "The Owl's Night Continues," "The Owl Spreads Its Wings," "Owl Night Long," "Owl For One, One For Owl," "Owl The Way Up" and now "Owl New World."

There will be another 20 such launches after today to finish building out the constellation, according to Rocket Lab.

Today's launch was Rocket Lab's 15th of 2025 and 73rd overall to date.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:50 p.m. ET on Oct. 14 with news of successful liftoff, then again at 1:54 p.m. ET with news of satellite deploy.

That's two in a row for Starship.

SpaceX's Starship , the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, aced a suborbital test flight today (Oct. 13), following up on a similar success in late August.

Today's mission, which lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, was the 11th overall test flight for the Starship program. It was also the final launch of the current version of the giant vehicle, which will soon be replaced by an even larger variant. And this swan song was a memorable one.

"Let 'em hear it, Starbase!" SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during the company's launch webcast today, as employees at the site cheered the test flight's successful conclusion. "What a day!"

A rocket for the moon and Mars

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk. Indeed, Musk, the world's richest man, has said he established SpaceX back in 2002 primarily to help our species set up shop on the Red Planet.

The moon is also in Starship's sights: NASA chose the vehicle to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to put boots on the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. If all goes to plan, Starship will land astronauts near the lunar south pole for the first time on the Artemis 3 mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2027.

Musk was on hand Monday evening to watch the Starship Flight 11 launch in person. But not from launch control.

"This is really the first time I'm going to be outside and watching the rocket," Musk said during a brief cameo on SpaceX's launch livestream. "It's going to be much more visceral."

Starship's secret sauce is its envisioned ability to loft incredibly large payloads with mind-boggling frequency. The vehicle is capable of carrying 165 tons (150 metric tons) to the final frontier, and both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and an upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the pad after each flight, catching them with the launch tower's "chopstick" arms. This strategy — which SpaceX has demonstrated three times to date with Super Heavy, though not yet with Ship — will allow superfast inspection and reflight, potentially allowing Starship to launch multiple times per day from a single site, according to Musk.

Today's launch, by coincidence, occurred on the one-year anniversary of SpaceX's first historic catch of a Super Heavy booster, on the Starship Flight 5 test flight.

The current iteration of the vehicle, known as Version 2, stands about 403 feet (123 meters) tall fully stacked. But future variants will be even bigger: Version 3 will be roughly 408 feet (124.4 m) tall, and a "Future Starship" that Musk teased in a May 2025 presentation will tower a whopping 466 feet (142 m) above the ground.

"Future Starship" is likely Version 4, which Musk later said is expected to debut in 2027. V4 will have a total of 42 Raptor engines — three more than the V2 and V3 variants. (The extra three will go on Ship, giving the upper stage nine engines.)

Test flight setbacks — and a bounceback

These are quite ambitious plans, and this summer they seemed even more so. On three straight test launches — Flight 7 in January, Flight 8 in March and Flight 9 in May — SpaceX lost Ship prematurely.

On Flights 7 and 8, the upper stage exploded less than 10 minutes after liftoff, sending debris raining down on parts of the Caribbean. On Flight 9, Ship broke apart upon reentry to Earth's atmosphere.

SpaceX lost another Ship in June, this time at Starbase: The vehicle that was being prepped for Flight 10 exploded on the test stand, forcing the company to press another Ship into service.

But that replacement upper stage performed well, as did its Super Heavy partner: Flight 10, which launched on Aug. 26, was a complete success. The booster came back to Earth as planned for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, and Ship did the same in the Indian Ocean an hour later.

Ship also managed to relight one of its Raptors in space, demonstrating an ability that will be crucial for future missions to the moon and Mars. The vehicle also deployed some payloads — eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, which were released on the same suborbital trajectory as that of Ship.

Flight 11 repeated those successes today.

The final flight of Starship V2

Flight 11's main goals were the same as those of Flight 10 — bring Super Heavy down in the Gulf and do the same with Ship off the coast of Western Australia, after an in-space Raptor relight and the deployment of eight more dummy Starlinks.

There were a few twists, however. For example, SpaceX employed a new landing burn strategy with Super Heavy today, trying out an engine configuration that will be used by the next-gen version of the booster.

"Super Heavy will ignite 13 engines at the start of the landing burn and then transition to a new configuration with five engines running for the divert phase," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 mission description. "Previously done with three engines, the planned baseline for V3 Super Heavy will use five engines during the section of the burn responsible for fine-tuning the booster’s path, adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns."

Flight 11 also marked the second-ever reflight of a Super Heavy: This same booster also conducted Flight 8, ending its duties that day with a return to Starbase and a chopsticks catch. SpaceX changed out just nine of its 33 Raptors ahead of today's flight, meaning that 24 of them were flight-proven.

The company tweaked Ship a bit as well, to gather data that could aid its future trips back to Earth. For example, SpaceX removed heat-shield tiles to stress-test certain "vulnerable areas" of the upper stage.

And, "to mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase, the final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver and will test subsonic guidance algorithms prior to a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean," SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

All of this went to plan on Flight 11, which kicked off with a launch from Starbase at 7:23 p.m. EDT (2323 GMT; 6:23 p.m. local Texas time). It was the final liftoff from the site's first orbital launch pad before it's overhauled to get ready for the Starship V3 variant.

"Among many other things, we're installing a new orbital launch mount, a new flame trench system, and upgrading the chopsticks for future catches," Jake Berkowitz, a SpaceX lead propulsion engineer, said during today's launch webcast. "So until that's complete, we'll be running launches from Pad 2, which will be online very soon."

Super Heavy and Ship separated about 2.5 minutes into flight today, and the booster made its pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf four minutes after that.

"Congrats to the whole SpaceX team," Berkowitz said after the huge booster hit the water. "That was incredible!"

Ship deployed the eight payloads over a six-minute stretch that began about 19 minutes after liftoff, when the vehicle was 119 miles (192 kilometers) above Earth. The vehicle also aced its brief Raptor relight, which occurred just under 38 minutes after launch.

Ship then made its own return to Earth, surviving the intense heat of reentry despite the selective heat shield tile-stripping. The vehicle aced its banking maneuver, then splashed down in the Indian Ocean a little over 66 minutes after liftoff.

And it was a pinpoint landing, occurring within view of a buoy-mounted camera that SpaceX set up beforehand. The dramatic imagery memorializes the successful sendoff for Starship V2, which now cedes the spotlight to its even bigger successors.

"We promised maximum excitement," Berkowitz said toward the end of today's launch webcast. "And Starship delivered!"

Update for 8:42p.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched its Starship Flight 11 rocket into space, with its Super Heavy booster making a planned - and controlled - splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ship 38 upper stage then successfully splashed down in Indian Ocean one hour and 6 minutes after liftoff after completing a Starlink payload deployment demonstration, engine relight test and "dynamic banking" manuever during landing. Read our Starship Flight 11 launch wrap story top see launch photos and video.

SpaceX plans to launch Flight 11 of its Starship megarocket tonight (Oct. 13), and you can watch the action live.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off for the 11th time on Monday (Oct. 13), during a 75-minute window that opens at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT).

The launch will take place from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of the company; coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX believes that the vehicle's unprecedented combination of power and reusability will allow humanity to settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Starship Flight 11 will look a lot like Flight 10, if all goes according to plan. On that most recent launch, which took place on Aug. 26, Super Heavy steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, and Ship did that same in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later.

Ship also managed to relight one of its Raptor engines in space and deploy some payloads — eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites.

Those will be the main goals for Flight 11 as well. SpaceX also plans to test a new landing burn engine configuration for Super Heavy and gather data that will help pave the way for Ship to end its missions with a return to Starbase, where it will be caught by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms.

Super Heavy has already done this on three previous Starship test flights. In fact, the booster flying on Monday is a spaceflight veteran, having conducted Starship Flight 8 earlier this year.

"For reentry, tiles have been removed from Starship to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 mission description.

"Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded to the vehicle and do not have a backup ablative layer," the company added. "To mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase, the final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver and will test subsonic guidance algorithms prior to a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean."

Update for 8:42p.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched its Starship Flight 11 rocket into space, with its Super Heavy booster making a planned - and controlled - splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ship 38 upper stage then successfully splashed down in Indian Ocean one hour and 6 minutes after liftoff after completing a Starlink payload deployment demonstration, engine relight test and "dynamic banking" manuever during landing. Read our Starship Flight 11 launch wrap story top see launch photos and video.

SpaceX plans to launch the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket tonight (Oct. 13), and we've got the information you need to tune in live.

The Starship Flight 11 test is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday (Oct. 13), during a 75-minute window that opens at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT; 6:15 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the liftoff live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX. You can visit our Starship Flight 11 live updates page for the latest info.

Flight 11 will be the fifth Starship launch of 2025. SpaceX hopes to build on the success of Flight 10, which launched on Aug. 26 and achieved all of its major objectives. (Flight 7, Flight 8 and Flight 9, which also launched this year, were more checkered; SpaceX lost the Starship upper stage prematurely on each of them.) SpaceX intends to settle Mars using Starship, and NASA has tapped the vehicle as the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. But the 400-foot-tall (121-meter-tall) Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — is still in the testing phase, and the company hopes Monday's action will get it closer to the finish line.

What time is SpaceX's Starship Flight 11 launch?

SpaceX is targeting Monday (Oct. 13), for the launch of Starship Flight 11, with liftoff expected at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT). SpaceX has a 75-minute launch window, however, so Starship could fly any time between 7:15 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. EDT (2315 to 0030 GMT).

According to local road closure alerts around Starbase, SpaceX has backup Flight 11 launch dates on Tuesday (Oct. 14) and Wednesday (Oct. 15), if Starship can't get off the ground on Monday.

Related: Read our SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy guide for a detailed look

Can I watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 11 launch?

You can watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 11 test launch in a few ways.

SpaceX will stream the liftoff live via its X account, as well as on its Starship Flight 11 mission page and the X TV app. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before launch — so, at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT), if SpaceX continues to target the beginning of the launch window on Monday.

Space.com will simulcast the SpaceX Flight 11 stream on our watch live page, as well as on our homepage and our YouTube channel.

If you want a longer livestream, you can check out NASASpaceflight's webcast on YouTube. This stream will begin at about 4:15 p.m. EDT (2015 GMT) and feature live commentary during "go for launch" polling and other key preflight activities.

Finally, if you're in the area, you can watch SpaceX's Starship Flight 11 in person. SpaceX doesn't have an official launch-viewing site for the public or the media, but you can find a spot yourself.

One good option is Cameron County Amphitheater, in Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island, which provides clear views of Starbase's orbital launch mount from across the water. You can also stake out a place along the shore of nearby Port Isabel.

Traffic in the area tends to get very heavy in the leadup to a Starship launch, so plan to get to your preferred viewing site early — multiple hours early, if possible.

How long is SpaceX's Starship Flight 11?

If all goes according to plan, Starship Flight 11 will last just over an hour. The mission will be broadly similar to Flight 10, with ocean landings planned for both Starship stages — the Super Heavy booster and Starship (or "Ship" for short) upper stage. (There will be no "chopsticks" catch of Super Heavy by the Starbase launch tower this time.)

"The upcoming flight will build on the successful demonstrations from Starship’s 10th flight test with flight experiments gathering data for the next-generation Super Heavy booster, stress-testing Starship's heat shield, and demonstrating maneuvers that will mimic the upper stage’s final approach for a future return to launch site," SpaceX wrote in a mission overview.

The Flight 11 Super Heavy already has a launch under its belt — it conducted Flight 8 on March 6, capping its work that day with a successful return to Starbase for a chopsticks catch. Twenty-four of its 33 Raptor engines are veterans of that previous mission, according to SpaceX.

The chief objective for Super Heavy this time around is to test a new landing-burn strategy for the next-generation Starship, a bigger vehicle that's expected to debut early next year. (Flight 11 will be the final launch of the current "Version 2" iteration of Starship.)

"Super Heavy will ignite 13 engines at the start of the landing burn and then transition to a new configuration with five engines running for the divert phase," SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

"Previously done with three engines, the planned baseline for V3 Super Heavy will use five engines during the section of the burn responsible for fine-tuning the booster’s path, adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns," the company added. "The booster will then transition to its three center engines for the end of the landing burn, entering a full hover while still above the ocean surface, followed by shutdown and dropping into the Gulf of America."

Ship will fly much farther and longer than Super Heavy on Flight 11. As on Flight 10, the upper stage will deploy eight payloads (dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites) into suborbital space. This milestone is scheduled to occur over a seven-minute stretch beginning 18.5 minutes after liftoff.

Ship will also briefly reignite one of its six Raptor engines in space a little under 38 minutes into the flight, demonstrating a key capability for a vehicle designed to travel to the moon and Mars.

In addition, Flight 11 will put Ship's heat shield and other reentry systems to the test, gathering data to pave the way for "chopstick" catches of the upper stage down the road.

"For reentry, tiles have been removed from Starship to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle," SpaceX wrote in the mission description. "Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded to the vehicle and do not have a backup ablative layer. To mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase, the final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver and will test subsonic guidance algorithms prior to a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean."

Ship is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere just under 48 minutes after launch and hit the water off the coast of Western Australia about 18 minutes later.

What if Starship Flight 11 can't launch?

SpaceX has two official backup days for Flight 11 at this point, according to a beach and road closure notice issued by Texas' Cameron County — Tuesday (Oct. 14) and Wednesday (Oct. 15).

The launch windows are likely the same on Tuesday and Wednesday, though we'll have to wait for confirmation from SpaceX on that end.

On Wednesday (Oct. 8), SpaceX posted photos on X showing the giant booster, known as Super Heavy, making the move to the orbital launch mount at the company's Starbase site in South Texas.

It's part of the leadup to Starship's 11th test flight, which is scheduled for Monday (Oct. 13) at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT). You'll be able to watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. The current iteration stands about 400 feet (121 meters) tall, and future versions will be bigger still, according to company founder and CEO Elon Musk.

The vehicle consists of two elements — Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short. Both are powered by SpaceX's Raptor engines — 33 for Super Heavy and six for Ship — and are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Super Heavy's Raptors take center stage in one of the newly released photos, which focuses on the booster's base as it's placed atop the launch mount.

The plan for Starship Flight 11 is similar to that of Flight 10, which launched on Aug. 26 and was a complete success.

As on that day, Super Heavy will come back to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. It will be the second reentry for this particular booster, which also launched on Starship Flight 8 this past March. That mission featured a catch of the booster by the Starbase launch tower's "chopstick" arms, which will not happen on Flight 11.

Ship, meanwhile, will deploy eight payloads into space on Flight 11 — dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites — and wrap things up by splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation continues to grow.

Twenty-four more Project Kuiper satellites took flight on Monday (Oct. 13), lifting off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 9:58 p.m. EDT (0158 GMT on Oct. 14). Launch was originally scheduled for Thursday evening (Oct. 9), but SpaceX pushed that back by four days.

It was SpaceX's third Project Kuiper launch and the sixth overall dedicated to building out the nascent network, which will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). With today's launch, 153 of them have now reached the final frontier.

The rest will be lofted on more than 70 additional launches conducted by a variety of rockets — the Falcon 9, Arianespace's Ariane 6, Blue Origin's New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur.

If all goes to plan today, the 24 Kuiper craft will be deployed by the Falcon 9's upper stage at an altitude of 289 miles (465 kilometers), over a 7.5-minute stretch that begins 56.5 minutes after liftoff.

"From there, we perform initial satellite health checks and prepare to raise the satellites to their assigned altitude of 392 miles (630 km), where they will be fully commissioned as part of our operational satellite constellation," Amazon representatives wrote in a mission description.

As on virtually every SpaceX launch, there was action in the downward direction today as well: The Falcon 9's first stage touched down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Just Read the Instructions" a little over eight minutes after liftoff.

It was the second launch and landing for this particular booster, according to SpaceX. The vehicle first flew Aug. 11 on another Project Kuiper launch, which happened to be SpaceX's 100th mission of the year.

Project Kuiper isn't the only broadband megaconstellation under construction in LEO. SpaceX's Starlink network already features more than 8,500 operational spacecraft, and it's growing all the time; SpaceX has launched more than 90 Starlink missions so far this year alone.

And China is building two megaconstellations of its own, Guowang ("National Network") and Qianfan ("Thousand Sails"), each of which will host about 13,000 satellites, if all goes to plan.

The Project Kuiper liftoff was the second of the day for SpaceX. On Monday evening, the company launched the 11th test flight of its Starship megarocket, sending the giant vehicle up from its Starbase site in South Texas. The mission was a complete success, according to SpaceX.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:10 p.m. ET on Oct. 9 with the new launch date of Oct. 11, then again at 3:15 p.m. ET on Oct. 11 with the new target date of Oct. 12, and again at 12:50 p.m. ET on Oct. 12 with the new target date of Oct. 13. It was updated again at 10:08 p.m. ET on Oct. 13 with news of successful liftoff and rocket landing.

Kinetica 2 is CAS Space's first orbital liquid propellant rocket, marking a huge leap in ambition from the smaller and less complex Kinetica 1 (or Lijian 1) solid rocket. After hot-fire testing of the rocket's first stage in recent months, the Kinetica 2 (Lijian 2) is now ready for launch from Jiuquan in northwest China, following clearance from the spaceport's authorities, which is likely to come only after the launch of the Shenzhou 21 crewed mission to China's Tiangong space station around late October.

The Kinetica 2 rocket is essentially ready, with all major tests completed and just a few final reviews pending, Liu Weipeng, CAS Space international marketing manager, told Space.com at the 76th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), which was held from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3 in Sydney, Australia.

The kerosene and liquid oxygen-propellant Kinetica 2 rocket has three core first stages and will be capable of carrying 17,200 pounds (7,800 kilograms) of payload into a sun-synchronous orbit, or 26,450 pounds (12,000 kg) into low Earth orbit. It will eventually also feature first-stage reusability.

Aboard will be a prototype cargo spacecraft, a first move for a low-cost cargo transportation system to serve Tiangong, called for by China's human spaceflight agency. The Qingzhou cargo spacecraft is from the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAMCAS). CAS Space itself is a commercial spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With Kinetica 2, CAS Space intends to compete for contracts to launch satellites for China's planned megaconstellations and send cargo to Tiangong. It will come up against strong competition from other Chinese commercial actors, including Landspace, iSpace, Space Pioneer, Galactic Energy and more, all of which are aiming to launch their own new rockets before the end of the year.

Sea launches and suborbital tourism

CAS Space, meanwhile, has further ambitions and wants to increase its launch rate. "We'll have six Kinetica 1 missions launching from the East China Sea," Liu said. Those would mark the company's first sea launches, supported by China's Eastern Maritime Spaceport on the coast of Shandong province, in eastern China.

According to Liu, a number of the Kinetica 1 team members previously worked on the Long March 11 solid rocket, which was developed by the state-owned space contractor CASC. The Long March 11 was the first Chinese rocket to launch from the sea back in 2019.

Beyond this, the company's plans to provide space tourism services are advancing. "We'll have more news by the end of the year," said Liu. There will soon be a first test flight of the crew capsule, launched via a solid booster. The test will include microgravity experiments.

"We have a detailed plan. So the vehicle will initially be ready by 2027," with commercial services to start in 2028, Liu said. The company tested its Kinecore engine for the Lihong 2 suborbital rocket in June.

CAS Space launched international payloads in August on a Kinetica 1 rocket. New international partners are lined up, with announcements to follow in due course, according to Liu.

Kinetica 2 will be a major challenge, marking a big step up in complexity and capability for the company. Success could open many doors. "We're very confident," Liu said.

Blue Origin's second New Glenn rocket just made a big move.

Jeff Bezos' company rolled a New Glenn first stage out to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday (Oct. 8) to help prep the vehicle for its upcoming liftoff.

That launch, which is expected to take place late this month or in November, will send NASA's twin ESCAPADE probes to Mars.

New Glenn stands about 320 feet tall (98 meters) when fully stacked. Like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the Blue Origin launcher features a reusable first stage.

New Glenn debuted this past January on a test flight that reached orbit as planned. Blue Origin tried to land the first stage on a ship at sea after liftoff that day but came up short.

Mission number two is an operational flight: It will send the two ESCAPADE ("Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers") orbiters rocketing toward the Red Planet, where they will study the Martian atmosphere and how it is affected by the solar wind and space weather.

Those two probes — which are named Blue and Gold, and were built by the California-based company Rocket Lab — arrived on Florida's Space Coast on Sept. 22.

Wednesday was a big day for Blue Origin. That same morning, the company sent six people to and from suborbital space on its New Shepard vehicle.

The mission, which launched from Blue Origin's West Texas site, was the company's 15th human spaceflight and the 36th overall launch of the New Shepard system.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched for the 29th time on Tuesday (Oct. 7), one shy of the company's reuse record.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 28 of the company's Starlink satellites lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Tuesday at 11:54 p.m. EDT (0354 GMT; 8:54 p.m. local California time).

The rocket's first stage returned to Earth as planned, touching down about 8.5 minutes after liftoff in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was the 29th launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated B1071. The record holder, Booster 1067, launched for the 30th time in late August.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage continued carrying the 28 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO) today. They were deployed on schedule about 60 minutes after launch.

Tuesday's launch was the 127th Falcon 9 flight of the year so far. More than 70% of these missions have been dedicated to building out the Starlink network, by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.

There are currently more than 8,500 operational Starlink satellites circling Earth, and more are going up all the time.

SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit early this morning (Oct. 7).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink satellites lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today at 2:46 a.m. EDT (0646 GMT).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas."

It was the eighth launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated B1090.

The Falcon 9's upper stage continued hauling the Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO), where they're scheduled to be deployed about 64 minutes after liftoff.

Today's launch was the 126th flight of the year for the workhorse Falcon 9, and the 130th liftoff overall for SpaceX.

The other four were suborbital test flights of the Starship megarocket, which the company is developing to help humanity settle Mars. Starship's fifth test launch of the year is coming up soon — it's scheduled for Oct. 13.

SpaceX has now launched its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket 125 times this year.

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's central coast today (Oct. 3), rising into the sky at 10:06 a.m. EDT (1406 GMT; 7:06 a.m. local California time).

The rocket is carrying 28 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, which its upper stage deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO) about an hour after launch, according to a SpaceX social media post.

The Falcon 9's first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth a little over eight minutes after liftoff today, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was the second launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designed B1097. Its other flight was also a Starlink mission, SpaceX wrote in a mission description.

More than 70% of the Falcon 9 launches in 2025 have been dedicated to building out Starlink, the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.

More than 8,500 active Starlink spacecraft circle Earth at the moment. There are just currently just 12,500 or so operational satellites of any kind in orbit, according to the European Space Agency — meaning that two out of every three functional spacecraft right now is a Starlink satellite. And that proportion is only going to climb as more and more Starlinks go up.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Avio signed a two-year contract worth 40 million euros (about $47 million U.S. at current exchange rates) on Monday (Sept. 29) at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here in Sydney, Australia, with the goal of preparing for in-flight demonstration of a reusable upper stage.

The work will cover the preliminary design and the technologies for the ground and flight segments required for an upper stage demonstrator.

It's too soon to know what the test vehicle will look like, but ESA put out a possible signpost on Monday. The agency posted on X a rendering that looks a lot like SpaceX's Starship megarocket upper stage.

The two-stage Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, which would be a potentially revolutionary spaceflight advance. Rocket upper stages, which deliver payloads to their desired orbits, typically remain in orbit or burn up on reentry to Earth's atmosphere. (First stages have historically been expendable as well, but SpaceX has changed that with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles.)

"I am glad to sign this contract since its importance is two-fold: on one side it addresses technological criticalities in the short-term; on the other side, it paves the way for the preparation of Europe's long-term future in space," ESA's Director of Space Transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen said in a statement.

ESA says the move capitalizes on progress made in advanced liquid propulsion, reentry, recoverability and reusability technologies. The upper stage could be used on future Vega rockets, also developed by Italian multinational Avio, or other European rockets.

The agency recently created the European Launcher Challenge to promote the development of new rockets and boost Europe's access to space. ESA is also working on a reusable space plane known as Space Rider, while ArianeGroup announced plans for the "Susie" reusable upper stage at the IAC in Paris in 2022.

ESA is not the only space actor looking to develop an upper stage or follow in the footsteps of SpaceX. The design of China's own Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket has been drastically altered in recent years, moving from an initially expendable launcher to a system similar to Starship and to also be eventually fully reusable.

SpaceX announced on Monday (Sept. 29) that it's targeting Oct. 13 for Starship Flight 11, which will be the final launch of the vehicle's current "Version 2" iteration.

Liftoff will occur from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. The window on Oct. 13 will open at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT; 6:15 p.m. local Texas time), SpaceX wrote in an update on Monday. The company will webcast the action, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk. The vehicle consists of two stainless-steel elements, both of which are designed to be fully reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short.

Starship Version 2 is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, towering nearly 400 feet (121 meters) above the ground when stacked. The next variant — Version 3, which will debut on Flight 12 — is larger still, at 408 feet (124.4 m) tall.

But the rocket will get even bigger over time, if all goes to plan: Version 4, which is expected to debut in 2027, is expected to be around 466 feet (142 m) tall.

Starship Flight 11 will be very similar to Flight 10, which lifted off on Aug. 26 and was a complete success.

On that most recent flight, Super Heavy steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned. Ship did the same in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia — but not before deploying eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites.

Flight 11 will target those same two splashdown zones, and Ship will aim to deploy another eight mock Starlinks, SpaceX wrote in Monday's update. And, as on Flight 10, SpaceX will remove some heat-shield tiles from Ship "to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle."

Super Heavy, meanwhile, will demonstrate "a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation Super Heavy." That plan calls for the booster to use five of its 33 Raptor engines to fine-tune its descent instead of the usual three, "adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns." The five-engine fine-tuning burn will be the baseline for Version 3 of Super Heavy, SpaceX wrote in the update.

And Flight 11 will be the second launch for this particular booster. It also completed Flight 8 this past March, coming back to Starbase for a catch by the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower — the planned recovery strategy for both Super Heavy and Ship on operational launches. Twenty-four of the Flight 11 Super Heavy's 33 Raptors are flight-proven, according to SpaceX.

This will be the second reuse of a Super Heavy. SpaceX also employed a flight-proven booster on Flight 9, which launched on May 27.

The first stage of the rocket that Firefly was prepping to make Alpha's seventh-ever flight exploded on Monday (Sept. 29) during a preflight trial.

"During testing at Firefly's facility in Briggs, Texas, the first stage of Firefly's Alpha Flight 7 rocket experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage," the Texas-based company wrote in an update on Monday afternoon. "Proper safety protocols were followed, and all personnel are safe. The company is assessing the impact to its stage test stand, and no other facilities were impacted."

It's another setback for Firefly, which suffered a failure during its most recent Alpha launch this past April.

During that mission, called "Message in a Booster," Alpha's first-stage booster broke apart shortly after separating from the upper stage. The anomaly damaged the upper stage's engine nozzle, compromising its thrust and leading to the loss of the payload, Lockheed Martin's LM 400 satellite technology demonstrator.

Firefly traced the problem to heat buildup in the first stage, caused by a phenomenon known as "plume-induced flow separation." Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration accepted the results of the company's anomaly investigation and its mitigation plan, clearing Alpha to launch once again.

The two-stage Alpha, which stands 96.7 feet (29.6 meters) tall, debuted in September 2021. Just two of its six orbital launches to date have been fully successful.

Alpha's seventh flight is slated to be another mission for Lockheed Martin, according to Firefly's launch page. Firefly had been targeting a liftoff later this year; it's too soon to predict how that schedule might change.

"Regular testing is part of Firefly's philosophy — we test each critical component, engine, and vehicle stage to ensure it operates within our flight requirements before we ship to the launch pad," the company wrote in Monday's update. "We learn from each test to improve our designs and build a more reliable system. We will share more information on the path forward at a later date."

Firefly doesn't just build rockets. Indeed, it's probably best known for its robotic Blue Ghost moon lander, the first of which aced its lunar mission for NASA in March of this year.

Parts of the Western United States were treated to a cosmic spectacle Sunday evening, as a giant streak illuminated the skies from Los Angeles to Phoenix.

Minutes after SpaceX's Sept. 28 Starlink launch lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Station (VSFS), in California, the Falcon 9 rocket supporting the mission reached the upper atmosphere to create a phenomenon often referred to as a "jellyfish" effect.

Falcon 9 launched at 11:04 p.m. EDT (7:04 p.m. local PDT; 0204 GMT, Sept. 29). The rocket carried 28 new Starlink satellites to join SpaceX's growing wireless internet megaconstellation of over 8,000 networked spacecraft. The dusk liftoff provided ideal conditions for the setting sun to illuminate Falcon 9's expanding engine exhaust against the darkening sky, as onlookers for hundreds of miles gazed in amazement.

The density of Earth's upper atmosphere causes the exhaust plume of a rocket's engines to expand as it ascends. The launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base is notorious for its overcast and extremely foggy conditions, but Sunday's clear skies created the ideal conditions for Falcon 9's jellyfish to emerge.

Among the many treated to the skyward spectacle, Space.com's Managing Editor Brett Tingley managed to snap a photo of the phenomenon as the rocket flew over Afton Canyon, in the Mojave Desert.

"I was camping in Afton Canyon in the Mojave National Preserve when I noticed a colorful streak of light in the sky. I've seen plenty of Falcon 9 'jellyfish' online but never in person." Tingley said. "It was lit up gorgeously from below by the setting sun and made for a surprising start to a night of dark sky stargazing."

Posts to X also highlighted the spectacle as it crossed the sky, like these photos and video from West Coast spaceflight photographer, @spacecoastwest:

Sightings were also reported to the American Meteor Society (AMC), which tracks and triangulates anomalies in the sky (usually meteorites) using witness submission data.

Last night's launch prompted seven different fireball reports to the website, with a video from spectators in Phoenix, Arizona, wondering if the long streak moving across the sky might be a comet.

Sunday's launch was the 28th mission for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, which landed downrange on SpaceX's droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," in the Pacific Ocean about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. The rocket's second stage continued to orbit, successfully deploying the satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO).

Sights like last night's aren't super rare, but can sometimes be hard to predict. Launches near dawn and dusk most often create the conditions for the jellyfish phenomenon, so if you live within a few hundred miles of a launchpad, keep your eyes to the skies.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lit up the dusk sky over southern California on Sunday (Sept. 28) as it carried a new stack of 28 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.

The evening launch at 10:04 p.m. EDT (0204 GMT on Sept. 29 or 7:04 p.m. PDT local time) from Vandenberg Space Force Base successfully reached space in just under minutes. The Falcon's upper stage booster was on track to deploy the broadband internet relays (Starlink Group 11-20) about an hour after leaving the ground.

The Falcon's first stage (Booster 1063), meanwhile, descended to a propulsive landing on its four deployed landing legs on "Of Course I Still Love You," a droneship positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 28th flight for this particular stage.

The launch added 28 Starlink satellites to SpaceX's megaconstellation, which now totals more than 8,500 active units.

The flight was SpaceX's 124th Falcon 9 mission this year out of a total 542 launches since 2010.

Blue Origin had originally targeted no earlier than Sept. 29 for the second New Glenn launch, designated NG-2, but now says the mission is slated for NET mid-October. The rocket's ESCAPADE payload is awaiting vehicle integration at Blue Origin's Astrotech Space Operations Facility in Titusville, Florida, while New Glenn's first stage (GS1) booster is prepped for an engine test at Launch Complex-36 (LC-36).

"ESCAPADE is at Astrotech and GS1 is headed to LC-36 in early October. Next up is the vehicle hotfire mid-month with launch soon thereafter," Blue Origin wrote in a post on social media.

NASA's ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) probes have been patiently waiting their turn for a ride to space for more than a year. The pair was slated to launch as a part of New Glenn's debut mission, but NASA ended up deciding not to risk its next flight to Mars on an unproven rocket.

The twin satellites were built by California-based Rocket Lab, and will be operated by the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory once they reach orbit.

Satisfied with Blue Origin's results from New Glenn's first liftoff, ESCAPADE was added back to the manifest and assigned as the rocket's second mission.

It's a high profile project for New Glenn, and is indicative of the level of confidence NASA has in the launch vehicle. The $80 million ESCAPADE mission will be New Glenn's first interplanetary launch and is headed to Mars orbit. There, the probes will study the planet's magnetosphere and analyze how energetic solar wind particles interact with the Martian atmosphere.

New Glenn's first launch successfully delivered a test version of Blue Origin's Blue Ring satellite bus to Earth orbit, but failed to recover the rocket's nearly 189-foot-tall (58-meter-tall) first stage booster during its landing attempt on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. Blue Origin plans to attempt a recovery the GS1 booster as part of the upcoming launch as well.

NG-2 will also carry a secondary payload. Satellite communications company Viasat is flying a technology demonstration as a part of NASA's Communications Services Project, which partners with the commercial sector to evolve networking technologies for near-Earth satellites.

SpaceX launched two dozen more of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit this morning.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 Starlink craft lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's central coast today at 12:26 a.m. EDT (0426 GMT; 9:26 p.m. on Sept. 25 local California time).

About 8.5 minutes later, the Falcon 9's first stage touched down on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

It was the 16th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1082. Twelve of those missions have been Starlink launches.

Meanawhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage continued carrying the Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit, where they're scheduled to be deployed 62.5 minutes after launch.

This morning's liftoff was the 123rd Falcon 9 launch of the year, and the 15th to take place already this September.

The vast majority of the 2025 Falcon 9 launches — more than 70% of them — have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation. There are now nearly 8,500 active spacecraft in the network, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

SpaceX launched yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit from Florida this morning (Sept. 25).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink craft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 4:39 a.m. EDT (0839 GMT).

The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth about 8.5 minutes later as planned, touching down on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" in the Atlantic Ocean.

According to a SpaceX mission description, it was the 22nd flight for this booster, which is designated B1080.

The Falcon 9's upper stage continued hauling the 28 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit, where they deployed 64 minutes after launch.

SpaceX has now launched 122 Falcon 9 missions in 2025, more than 70% of them devoted to building out the huge and ever-growing Starlink megaconstellation.

Starlink — by far the largest satellite network ever assembled — currently consists of more than 8,400 active spacecraft, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

Another batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband satellites has taken flight this morning (Sept. 25).

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket topped with 27 Project Kuiper craft lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, at 8:09 a.m. EDT (1209 GMT).

The Project Kuiper megaconstellation will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). These spacecraft will be lofted on more than 80 launches performed by a variety of rockets — SpaceX's Falcon 9, Arianespace's Ariane 6, Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur.

Today's launch was the fifth such mission, following two Atlas V and two Falcon 9 liftoffs that sent a total of 102 Project Kuiper satellites to LEO.

Today's mission employed an Atlas V 551, the most powerful variant of the workhorse launcher, which features five side-mounted solid rocket boosters.

The Atlas V's upper stage deployed the 27 satellites at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). After that, "the Project Kuiper team will take over command of the mission from our 24/7 mission operations center in Redmond, Washington, confirm satellite health and ultimately raise the satellites to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 km) above Earth," Amazon representatives wrote in a mission description.

Launch and space systems company Rocket Lab delivered the twin ESCAPADE ("Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers") spacecraft to NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Monday (Sept. 22).

The twin probes, named Blue and Gold, are designed to study Mars' atmosphere. The spacecraft will now be inspected and tested ahead of integration with the 322-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn rocket in preparation for launch, which is scheduled to occur no earlier than this fall.

The $80 million mission is part of NASA's Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, which targets high-value science while operating on tighter budgets and shorter timelines.

Blue and Gold will enter elliptical orbits around Mars to study how the planet interacts with the solar wind and also how the planet's atmosphere is stripped away by solar wind and space weather effects. They carry magnetometers, to measure magnetic fields, electrostatic analyzers to detect ions and electrons, and Langmuir probes for measuring key parameters of plasma.

California-based Rocket Lab designed and developed the spacecraft over a 3.5-year period, based on the company's interplanetary Explorer spacecraft platform.

"Delivering two interplanetary spacecraft on schedule and within budget for a Mars mission is no small feat, and it speaks to the determination and agility of our team. They've proven that we can take a concept from design to Mars readiness in just a few short years," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement.

The mission will be the second flight of the powerful New Glenn rocket, which reached orbit on its debut flight in January of this year. Notably, this mission is taking place outside of the traditional Hohmann transfer windows for Mars, which open for a few weeks every 26 months and are the most energy-efficient times for launch. Instead, New Glenn will send the ESCAPADE probes on a longer, 22-month cruise phase to Mars, meaning they are scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in the second half of 2027.

Launch will take place at New Glenn's pad at Space Launch Complex-36, located at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. The University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory will take over management of the mission for NASA once the ESCAPADE probes are in space.

These three spacecraft embarked on a shared ride to orbit early Wednesday morning (Sept. 24).

What is it?

While each spacecraft has a unique role, all three missions are united by a common theme: studying the solar wind, a continuous outflow of charged particles from the sun, and the effects of space weather throughout our solar system.

NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will study Earth's exosphere, also known as the geocorona, to hopefully give new insights into how our planet interacts with solar radiation.

In contrast, NOAA's SWFO-L1 probe will look at solar storms from Lagrange Point 1, a stable orbital location about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, giving critical early warnings about incoming space weather.

Where is it?

This photo was taken at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Why is it amazing?

Unlike the other two spacecraft, NASA's IMAP will be looking farther from home, focusing on the boundary layer of our solar system and mapping and analyzing the interactions between the solar wind and interstellar space.

Space weather can disrupt GPS signals and communications satellites and even endanger astronauts in orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS) or en route to the moon or Mars. So, understanding how to predict space weather and mitigate against it could have wide-ranging impacts on modern society.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about NASA's IMAP mission and the effects of space weather.

SpaceX just sent three space weather probes to the final frontier.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida today (Sept. 24) at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT), carrying NASA's IMAP mission and and two other spacecraft.

Each probe has its own objectives, but all three will work toward the same larger goal: help scientists better understand space weather and its effects on Earth.

They're also all headed to the same place — the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, in the direction of our star.

IMAP (short for "Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe") is the primary payload on today's flight. The roughly $600 million spacecraft carries 10 different science instruments, which it will use to monitor solar activity as well as study interstellar dust and the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from our sun.

The mission's data will also help scientists map the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the vast bubble around our solar system that's dominated by the sun's solar wind and magnetic field.

IMAP will also provide radiation warnings for astronauts — for example, those with NASA's Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustained human presence on and around the moon over the next decade or so.

"Radiation exposure is a real threat to our astronauts traveling to the moon and beyond," Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference on Sunday (Sept. 21).

"Humanity has only ever existed inside our protective magnetosphere, and as we travel beyond that protective shield, whether it be to the moon or to Mars, the actionable information from missions like IMAP will keep our astronauts safe," she added.

The other two spacecraft that went up today are NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (CGO) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Follow-on (SWFO-L1) spacecraft.

CGO will investigate the exosphere, the wispy outermost reaches of Earth's atmosphere. The small satellite "will image the faint glow of ultraviolet light from this region, called the geocorona, to better understand how space weather impacts our planet," NASA officials said in a mission description. "The Carruthers mission continues the legacy of the Apollo era, expanding on measurements first taken during Apollo 16."

SWFO-L1 will track solar storms, providing an early warning system for space weather, which can pose a threat to satellites, astronauts in orbit and some infrastructure on the ground, such as power grids.

All went according to plan on today's launch. The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed IMAP into an interplanetary transfer orbit about 84 minutes after launch. SWFO-L1 and CGO followed suit about 6.5 minutes and 13 minutes after that, respectively.

And the rocket's first stage came back to Earth on schedule, landing a little less than nine minutes after liftoff on the SpaceX droneship "Just Read the Instructions," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the second flight for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

Today's launch was the 120th Falcon 9 flight of 2025 already. Most of these missions — more than 70% of them — have been dedicated to building out SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet constellation in low Earth orbit.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:55 a.m. ET on Sept. 24 with news of successful spacecraft deployment.

SpaceX is continuing to gear up for the next flight of its Starship megarocket, which may be just around the corner.

The company conducted a "static fire" test with its latest Starship upper stage recently, firing up its six Raptor engines while the vehicle remained anchored to the launch mount at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.

The milestone, which SpaceX announced via X on Monday evening (Sept. 22), is part of the prep work for Starship's 11th test flight. The company has already static-fired the Super Heavy first-stage booster that will fly on that mission.

SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle Mars and embark on other exploration tasks. Both of its elements — Super Heavy and the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship or simply "Ship" — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Starship has flown in its stacked configuration 10 times to date, most recently on Aug. 26. That test launch was a success; both Super Heavy and Ship splashed down in their target zones (the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean, respectively), and Ship deployed eight dummy payloads into space as planned. That had never been done before on a Starship flight.

Flight 10 was a bounce-back mission for Starship; SpaceX had lost Ship prematurely on the previous three test flights, and another one of the upper-stage vehicles exploded on the test stand this past June.

SpaceX has not yet announced a target launch date for Flight 11, which will be the final mission of Starship's current "Version 2" iteration.

The company will soon start flying Starship Version 3, an even bigger vehicle that will be capable of getting cargo and people to Mars. If all goes well with the Version 3 test campaign, the first fleet of uncrewed Starships could launch toward the Red Planet in late 2026, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.

SpaceX launched another batch of spy satellites for the U.S. government today (Sept. 22).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Sept. 22) at 1:38 p.m. EDT (1738 GMT; 10:38 a.m. local California time), on a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

That flight, called NROL-48, is the 11th dedicated to building out NRO's "proliferated architecture," a new network that relies on large numbers of relatively small, cost-effective reconnaissance and communications satellites rather than just a few big, expensive ones.

"To stay ahead of the competition and ensure it can continue to operate in a heightened threat environment, the NRO is modernizing its architecture in space and on the ground — delivering more capability faster with increased resilience," NRO officials said in a press kit about the proliferated architecture network, which you can find here.

"A greater number of satellites — large and small, government and commercial, in multiple orbits — will deliver an order of magnitude more signals and images than is available today," the officials added. "They will provide greater revisit rates, increased coverage, more timely delivery of information — and ultimately help us deliver more of what our customers need even faster."

Neither SpaceX nor the NRO provided any detail about the payloads going up on NROL-48. However, the proliferated architecture satellites are thought to be modified versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet spacecraft, outfitted with high-tech sensors and other gear.

Everything appeared to go well on today's flight. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, touching down on a Vandenberg landing pad about 7.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the 18th mission for this particular booster, according to SpaceX.

The company ended its launch webcast shortly thereafter at the NRO's request, so we didn't get to see the payloads deploy. And SpaceX's mission description didn't specify exactly where and when that was supposed to happen.

All 11 proliferated architecture missions have launched atop Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg. The first one lifted off in May 2024, and the most recent one before today launched this past April.

SpaceX will launch NASA's ambitious IMAP mission and two other space weather probes early Wednesday morning (Sept. 24), and you can watch the action live.

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT), carrying IMAP and two rideshare spacecraft deep into the final frontier.

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage is expected to will begin around 6:40 a.m. EDT (1040 GMT).

The primary payload is IMAP, whose name is short for "Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe."

IMAP "will study how the sun's energy and particles interact with the heliosphere — an enormous protective bubble of space around our solar system — to enhance our understanding of space weather, cosmic radiation, and their impacts on Earth and human and robotic space explorers," NASA officials wrote in a mission description.

Launching with IMAP are NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (CGO) and the Space Weather Follow-on (SWFO-L1) spacecraft, which will be operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

CGO will study Earth's exosphere — the atmosphere's wispiest outer reaches — to help scientists better understand how space weather affects our planet. SWFO-L1 will monitor and track solar storms, "serving as an early warning beacon for potentially disruptive space weather, helping safeguard Earth’s critical infrastructure and technological-dependent industries," NASA officials wrote in the mission description.

The trio will do this work at the Earth-sun Lagrange Point-1 (L1), a gravitationally stable spot that lies 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. Several other spacecraft operate at L1, including India's Aditya-L1 solar probe and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency.

If all goes according to plan on Wednesday, the Falcon 9's upper stage will deploy IMAP, CGO and SWFO-L1 into interplanetary transfer orbit during a 13-minute stretch that begins about 83 minutes after liftoff. The three spacecraft will then make their way out to L1.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:25 p.m. ET on Sept. 22 with the new target launch date of Sept. 24.