Category: Launches & Spacecraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No rocket had ever reached orbit from Western European soil — until today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another reusable Chinese rocket has taken to the skies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it?

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

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

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

Why is it incredible?

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

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

The Starlink missions keep on coming.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 27 of the company's internet satellites to orbit this morning (Sept. 2), lifting off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4:42 a.m. EDT (0842 GMT; 1:42 a.m. local California time).

It was the 35th flight for this Falcon 9's first stage, which is known as Booster 1063. That's just two shy of the SpaceX reuse record, which was set by B1067 last week.

And B1063 will almost certainly fly again: It came back to Earth successfully today, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after launch.

The rocket's upper stage did its part as well, deploying the 27 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit 62 minutes after launch. They're joining the largest satellite constellation ever assembled, which currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft.

This morning's launch was the 102nd Falcon 9 flight of the year, 79 of which have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

SpaceX has launched four other times in 2026 as well, conducting two missions of its Falcon Heavy rocket and two suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket, which remains in development. The second Falcon Heavy launch of the year occurred on Sunday (Aug. 30); it sent up NASA's next flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Standing in the parking lot of the Titusville Hobby Lobby was maybe something I should have planned on before traveling to Florida for the launch of NASA's Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, but it was not where I expected to be until I was speeding there in my car.

Rocket enthusiasts and locals around Florida's Space Coast gathered Sunday morning (Aug. 30) to watch SpaceX's latest Falcon Heavy launch. The triple-booster rocket launched NASA's newest flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now on its way to an orbital sweet spot nearly 1 million miles from Earth to image the widest views of the universe ever captured, map planets around alien stars and usher in a new wave of discovery into phenomena like dark matter and dark energy.

Liftoff occurred at 07:26:49 a.m. EDT (11:26:49 GMT), from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Specifying those 49 seconds was very important. Roman's launch opportunity is known as an "instantaneous" launch window because its proper orbital delivery was dependent on getting the time right down to the very second. And the seconds mattered for those watching the launch, too. Any fewer, and the clouds from viewing the location of dozens of photographers at Hobby Lobby, myself included, wouldn't have cleared in time. Any more and the sun would have moved too high in the sky to capture what me and all those photographers were hoping to capture.

The early morning launch got off the ground a little more than 20 minutes after sunrise, while the bright glowing orb was still relatively low in the sky. The Space Coast's eastward shores on the Atlantic Ocean, coincidentally, sometimes offer the rare alignment with one of the missions launching from KSC for a rocket to fly right in front of the sun on its way to space, but only from specific vantage points.

Plotting and predicting the trajectories of a launch vehicle is no easy task, but it is made incredibly simpler using certain softwares like the popular FlightClub.io, which is used by many photographers to help line up shots that would be nearly impossible without a rocket's flight trajectory info before launch. That, and apps like PhotoPills or The Photographer's Ephemeris are incredibly useful for planning rocket launch photos ahead of time.

It's rare for a launch to line up just right, and even more rare for a launch vehicle like Falcon Heavy, which flies far less often than SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, to line up for a solar transit the way Roman's launch did. The sun rises in a slightly different spot on the horizon each day, and even a few minutes delay in a launch can be enough for the sun to move out of alignment of where the rocket is going to fly. And the alignment for Roman's launch happened to be in the parking lot of Hobby Lobby.

I hadn't checked FlightClub.io, and was so focused on other parts of launch coverage for Roman's mission, I didn't think to check if a transit was in the cards for Sunday morning. But as the excitement for launch built, and the days until Roman's launch dwindled, excitement over the possibility of a solar transit spread among the photojournalists at KSC.

Shooting the transit, though, meant leaving KSC during launch, which meant sacrificing literal front row seats to one of the world's most powerful rockets. The KSC press site sits just three miles (4.8 km) LC-39A. Hobby Lobby in Titusville, on the other hand, is about 12 miles away (19 km). And there were some concerns about clouds, too.

Weather during Saturday's prelaunch mission briefing forecasted only a 50% of favorable weather conditions for Sunday, and when the morning of launch arrived, clouds on the horizon weren't showing obvious signs of clearing in time for liftoff.

I was torn.

I didn't want to sacrifice getting a shot of the launch by leaving KSC if the clouds were going to persist, but if it worked, this would be my first ever solar transit rocket launch photo. About an hour before launch, Space Scout's David Diebold popped into the KSC press site, and told me when I asked him that of course he was going to try for the shot. "No guts, no glory," he said. He was on his way out the door as he said it. David also offered to lend me one of his solar filters for my camera, which was another very influential factor in my decision.

It takes about 25 minutes to get from the press site at KSC to the strip in Titusville where Hobby Lobby sits, and the launch was about 45 minutes away. Checking the clouds one more time, I decided to take the chance. "No guts, no glory," I told my fellow Space.com reporters, who were able to manage things from the press site in my absence.

I jumped in my car and headed to Hobby Lobby.

Everyone else who tried for this shot was already there when I arrived, and so were hundreds of other launch spectators across the street, lining the stretch of spots along the Banana River where several launchpads stand in view. Thankfully, I was able to squeeze in between fellow launch photographers Andrew McCarthy from Consider the Cosmos, and NASA Space Flight's Max Evans, both of whom generously offered me some last-minute advice for my camera settings.

I shot on a Canon R5 Mark II, an absolute unit of photography engineering and one of Canon's newest full-frame mirrorless cameras, with an RF100-400mm F5.6-8. With my lens zoomed all the way up to 400 and my solar filter from David on the end, I cranked the R5's exposure down to 1/20000 and set aperture to F16 and waited with just a few minutes until liftoff.

It wasn't until those last minutes that the clouds finally did clear. Someone listening to SpaceX's live stream began a countdown from 5 seconds, and everyone went silent and hands and eyes moved to cameras and viewfinders.

"Liftoff."

I didn't even look up to try to see if I could make out the rocket on the horizon. I just waited for a moment seconds later when Falcon Heavy flew across the face of the sun. It happened in a split second. I just held my finger down on the shutter button and hoped.

Rocket launches are inherently risky endeavors. Millions of dollars go into designing and building the unique satellites sent to orbit, and millions more on the launch vehicles that get them there. But launches don't always go as planned, and the nature of rockets means that if something goes wrong, often things go very wrong. They are, after all, vehicles channeling controlled explosions through Earth's turbulent atmosphere into the unforgiving vacuum of space.

But we do it anyway. We send the amazing things into the cosmos to expand humanity's understanding of the universe. Like the new era of discovery about to be ushered in as Roman journeys to its final destination in orbit, we take the risks because the payoffs are so tremendous. And when we do, it makes getting the shot that much better.

No guts, no glory.

NASA's next big space telescope has left Earth, but it's not ready to start observing the heavens just yet.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched yesterday (Aug. 30), riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket into the heavens. Astronomers are very excited about Roman, for it's expected to discover thousands of new exoplanets and shed light on mysterious dark energy and dark matter, among other accomplishments.

Such science work is a few months off, however. Here's a brief rundown of the next steps for the Roman team.

A long journey

The first order of business is getting Roman to its destination. The 42-foot-long (12.7 meters) scope isn't staying in Earth orbit; it's headed to the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), which lies about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the Marsward direction.

There are multiple reasons to target L2, which also hosts NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Europe's Euclid probe.

"At this special place in space," NASA officials wrote in a Roman explainer, "gravitational forces balance to keep objects in steady orbits with very little assistance."

"Roman's barrel-like shape will help block out unwanted light from the sun, Earth and moon, and the spacecraft’s distant location will help keep the instruments cool," they added. "The thermal stability of an observatory at L2 will provide a ten-fold improvement beyond Hubble in much of the data Roman will gather."

And don't worry about Roman and JWST bumping heads; though their cosmic addresses will be the same, they won't actually share space.

"Like Webb, Roman will trace out a large orbit around the actual L2 point — much larger than the moon's orbit around Earth — and the two will easily be kept far apart," NASA wrote in a different Roman piece.

It'll take Roman about 30 days to fly out to L2 and settle into its looping orbit there. A new round of work will then begin for the Roman team.

Checking Roman out

That work is "commissioning" — making sure that all of Roman's systems and subsystems are working properly, as is its science gear, which consists of the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI).

WFI "is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow scientists to look very far back in time," NASA officials wrote in the explainer. "Seeing the universe in its early stages will help unravel how it has expanded throughout its history, which will hint at how it may continue to evolve."

CGI is a technology demonstration that will block the light of distant stars, allowing Roman to spot a wealth of previously unknown alien worlds.

"It will be far more powerful than any other coronagraph ever flown, seeing planets that are almost a billion times fainter than their host star," NASA officials wrote.

Roman should be ready to begin its science work in early 2027, according to the nonprofit Planetary Society. Its science life is slated to last five years, but astronomers are doubtless hoping for more. And there's precedent for such optimism; after all, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong today, more than 36 years after its launch.

Hubble is a special case, given that astronauts repaired and upgraded it over the course of five servicing missions between 1993 and 2009. But other NASA space telescopes have far outlasted their warranties without such help. For example, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is operational in Earth orbit today, more than 25 years after its launch — and it has overcome budget issues along the way.

SpaceX's next astronaut mission to the International Space Station won't launch on Sept. 12 after all.

That flight, known as Crew-13, has been delayed due to an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, NASA announced on Saturday (Aug. 29).

"Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework prior to launch," NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. "A new target date will be announced once available."

Crew-13 will launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

As its name suggests, it will be the 13th operational astronaut mission SpaceX flies to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. (The company also conducted a crewed test flight to the orbiting lab, called Demo-2, which launched in May 2020.)

Crew-13 will send NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney of NASA, the Canadian Space Agency's Josh Kutryk, and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos to the ISS for a seven-month stay.

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," Watkins said during an Aug. 3 press conference.

There will also be "visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach," she added.

SpaceX just launched a high-profile mission for NASA, sending the agency's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into the final frontier on Sunday (Aug. 30) atop a Falcon Heavy rocket.

And the company is gearing up for an important test flight of Starship, the next-generation megarocket that it thinks will revolutionize spaceflight. The upcoming liftoff, the 14th to date for Starship, will see the rocket reach Earth orbit for the first time, if all goes to plan. SpaceX is thought to be targeting mid-September for Starship Flight 14.