A cutting-edge hypersonic vehicle just hit a big flight milestone.

Stratolaunch's reusable, autonomous Talon-A craft now has more than 10 successful flights under its belt, the California-based company announced late last month.

"Reaching more than 10 successful hypersonic flights with Talon-A is a testament to our team's dedication and the robustness of our technology," Stratolaunch President and CEO Zachary Krevor said in a July 22 statement. "We are transforming hypersonic testing from a rare event into a routine service, empowering our customers to innovate at unprecedented speed."

Stratolaunch has two Talon-A vehicles, each of which is about 28 feet (8.5 meters) long with a wingspan of 11.3 feet (3.4 m). The craft can travel through Earth's atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) — the definition of hypersonic flight.

Talon-A missions start beneath the belly of a carrier plane, which hauls the robotic vehicle into the sky and drops it down. Stratolaunch has two such carriers — a modified Boeing 747 called Spirit of Mojave and Roc, a custom-built vehicle that measures a whopping 385 feet (117 m) from wingtip to wingtip, the biggest wingspan in aviation history.

Roc and Spirit of Mojave lift off from Mojave Air and Space Port in southeastern California and tend to drop Talon-A over the Pacific Ocean. After completing its hypersonic flight, the vehicle comes back for a runway landing in California, generally at Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the state's scenic central coast.

These jaunts test sensors and advanced new materials in the hypersonic flight environment, among other tasks. Details about Talon-A's payloads tend to be sparse, likely because many Stratolaunch customers — the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, for example — are tight-lipped by nature.

Indeed, military agencies around the world are increasingly interested in hypersonic tech. Superfast, maneuverable vehicles like Talon-A are tougher to track and intercept than ballistic missiles, which follow predictable trajectories despite moving fast. (To be clear: Talon-A itself is not a weapon or weapon-delivery system; it's a technology testbed.)

Stratolaunch isn't the only company that gives customer payloads hypersonic rides. Rocket Lab provides this service with HASTE, a suborbital version of its workhorse Electron rocket.

HASTE debuted in June 2023 and now has nine flights under its belt. But the vehicle's cadence will likely increase soon; in March, Rocket Lab signed a $190 million contract to conduct 20 HASTE missions for the U.S. military.

SpaceX has sent yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday (July 31) at 11:08 p.m. EDT (8:08 p.m. local time; 0308 GMT on Aug. 1).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 26th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1081.

The 24 Starlink satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO) 61.5 minutes after liftoff as planned, SpaceX confirmed via X.

They're joining more than 10,800 other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

SpaceX has now launched 89 Falcon 9 missions in 2026, 69 of which have been dedicated Starlink flights.

The company also has three other liftoffs under its belt this year — one launch of its powerful Falcon Heavy vehicle and two test flights of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

We just got an amazing new view of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, thanks to one of the company's next-gen Starlink satellites.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, launched on its 13th test flight from South Texas last Friday (July 24). The suborbital jaunt was similar in many respects to past Starship test missions, with one big exception: This time, the vehicle deployed a batch of functional, next-gen Starlink internet satellites into space.

Six of those "Starlink V3" spacecraft carried cameras, so that SpaceX could get good views of the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, which is known as Starship, or simply Ship. The satellites did that job and more, capturing amazing views of Ship as it cruised away from them high above Earth.

SpaceX shared one such view on X Friday evening (July 31) — a 65-second video that stitches together imagery taken by four different cameras on a single Starlink V3 satellite.

The video starts with an up-close view of the shiny, 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship. We see more of the vehicle as the footage rolls and the two spacecraft get farther and farther apart. Toward the end, we see Ship in its entirety, and we get a sense of its activity; three of its six Raptor engines are firing, and small puffs of white vapor indicate that the vehicle is engaging its fine-tuning reaction control thrusters.

Like all Starship test missions to date, Flight 13 targeted a suborbital trajectory. So the 20 Starlink V3 satellites, the first ever to reach space, did not stay up for long; they came back down to Earth about 20 minutes after deploying into the final frontier.

Their successors will get higher — and there will be many of them. According to a filing with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX wants to operate a megaconstellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 satellites.

Starship will be key to building and maintaining this constellation, which will require many launches of the brawny, fully reusable rocket. (SpaceX currently operates a constellation of nearly 11,000 Starlink satellites, but those V2 craft are considerably smaller than the 4,400-pound V3 iteration.)

Ship seems to have checked all of its boxes on Flight 13. After deploying the satellites and successfully reigniting one of its Raptors in space, it splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff.

The vehicle survived its harrowing return trip through Earth's atmosphere in one piece and remains intact today, as far as we know; SpaceX recently shared a photo of the vehicle bobbing in the Indian Ocean five days after splashdown.

But Starship's giant first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, had a few issues on Flight 13. Its landing burn employed only five of a planned 13 Raptor engines, for example, and the booster hit the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at a higher velocity than intended. (Super Heavy has a total of 33 Raptors, all of which fire at liftoff.)

Starship remains in the development phase, but SpaceX wants to get the megarocket operational soon. It's slated to fly on NASA's Artemis III astronaut mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and to land a crew near the moon's south pole on Artemis IV in late 2028.

SpaceX launched a secret reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government early on Thursday morning (July 30).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, kicking off the mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-95.

The launch occurred at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 GMT).

We know very little about NROL-95; the NRO, which operates the country's fleet of spy satellites, has provided no details about the payload or its activities.

The agency has revealed the NROL-95 mission patch. It depicts a snarling ferret with a nighttime sky in the background and the words "We are the Champions" on the emblem's lower border.

"The ferret, a clever creature, embodies agility and resilience — key traits for exploration. Its confident grin and bright eyes reflect a spirit of victory in a realm where determination meets adventure," NRO officials said in an NROL-95 mission description.

"The bold phrase 'We are the Champions' encapsulates the camaraderie and pride shared among those on this purposeful mission," they added.

NROL-95 was the fourth NRO launch of 2026. The other three — NROL-105 in January, NROL-172 in May and NROL-179 in June — also flew aboard Falcon 9s, but from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Those three other missions were devoted to building out the NRO's "proliferated architecture" constellation, which will consist of hundreds of relatively small, cost-efficient reconnaissance satellites in Earth orbit.

On Thursday, the Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral about 8.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the seventh mission for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

SpaceX cut off its livestream shortly thereafter, at the request of the agency.

A U.S.-Russian crew will return to Earth from the International Space Station early Sunday morning (July 26), and you can watch their homecoming live.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos is scheduled to undock from the orbiting lab on Sunday at 3:02 a.m. EDT (0702 GMT).

The Soyuz, known as MS-28, will land on the steppe of Kazakhstan about 3.5 hours later, at 6:26 a.m. EDT (1026 GMT). You can watch these milestones here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.

The coverage starts today (July 25) at 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT) ahead of a change-of-command ceremony aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Kud‑Sverchkov will hand over the reins of the orbiting lab to NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, part of the transition from ISS Expedition 74 to Expedition 75 (which officially begins when Soyuz MS‑28 undocks). You can watch that live via NASA.

NASA will resume its webcast tonight at 11:10 p.m. EDT (0310 GMT on July 26) to cover crew farewells and the closing of the hatches between the ISS and Soyuz MS-28, which is expected at 11:30 p.m. EDT (0330 GMT).

Undocking coverage begins Sunday at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT). The stream will pick up again at 5:15 a.m. EDT (0915 GMT) for deorbit and landing activities. Touchdown will occur southeast of the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan, according to NASA.

Soyuz MS-28 launched to the ISS on Nov. 27, which was Thanksgiving Day. That liftoff kicked off the first space mission for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud‑Sverchkov.

When it's all said and done, the trio will have spent 241 days in space on their current flight. They will have orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveled a total of more than 102 million miles (164 million kilometers).

After touchdown, the three spaceflyers "will fly by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where recovery teams are based," NASA officials wrote in a media advisory. "Williams then will return to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Kud‑Sverchkov and Mikaev head back to their training base in Star City, Russia."

The world's most powerful solid-fuel rocket just aced its third-ever mission.

Gravity-1, a distinctively squat and stubby rocket, launched Tuesday night (July 21) from the deck of a ship stationed off the coast of Shanghai.

Liftoff occurred at 10:54 p.m. EDT (0254 GMT and 10:54 a.m. Beijing time on July 22), according to the state-run Chinese outlet Xinhua, which further reported that all nine satellites reached "their designated orbits." Details about those satellites were not provided.

Gravity-1 is operated by Orienspace, a company based in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. The rocket stands about 100 feet (30 meters) tall — less than half the height of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 vehicle.

Gravity-1 consists of three core stages and four strap-on boosters, all of which feature solid rocket motors. The launcher can haul up to 14,300 pounds (6,500 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), making it the most powerful solid rocket in the world. (For comparison: The liquid-fueled Falcon 9 can deliver a maximum of 50,265 pounds, or 22,800 kg, to LEO.)

The Chinese vehicle now has three flights under its belt, all of which launched from ships at sea and achieved full mission success. Gravity-1's first two flights occurred in January 2024 and October 2025.

There won't be such a long gap before Gravity-1 flies again, if all goes to plan. The rocket is expected to launch a batch of Chinese internet satellites in the next few months, according to the state-run outlet CGTN.

And Orienspace's ambitions don't end with Gravity-1. The company is also developing Gravity-2 and Gravity-3, larger, more powerful rockets that will feature liquid-fueled core stages and solid rocket boosters.

Gravity-2 could be ready to fly by the end of the year, CGTN reported. And that vehicle will likely lift off from an ocean-based pad as well.

"Sea launch of solid-propellant rockets paves the way for future launch of liquid rockets at sea," said Gravity-1 chief designer Xu Guoguang, according to CGTN. "We are also considering other methods, such as launching from drilling platforms."

The fight continues against SpaceX's controversial South Texas land swap.

That deal, which the company made with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), gives SpaceX 727 acres (294 hectares) of public land that's currently part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. In exchange, the company hands over 683 acres (276 hectares) of its territory in the area, not all of it contiguous, to the USFWS.

Last month, a coalition of conservation and tribal groups sued the USFWS over the swap, saying it degrades the refuge and violates multiple laws, including the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997. And yesterday (July 20), those groups filed an emergency injunction, asking a federal judge to stop the exchange until the courts can rule on the ongoing case.

"Federal officials are racing to fork over America's public lands to one of wealthiest corporations on Earth before the courts can even weigh in," Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement yesterday (July 20).

"This refuge is one of the last places left for the public to enjoy nature in the Rio Grande Valley," Jordahl added. "Why should Texans be forced to surrender even more of their public lands to a trillion-dollar corporation? The court has to intervene now, because once these refuge lands are transferred to SpaceX, they’re gone forever."

The land set to be transferred to SpaceX is near Starbase, the manufacturing and launch hub for the company's Starship megarocket. SpaceX sees Starship as transformational; it's the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Starship remains in the development-and-testing phase. It has flown 12 suborbital test flights to date, all of them from Starbase, and is gearing up for Flight 13 this Thursday (July 23).

These launches pose a threat to the wildlife that the 90,000-acre (36,420 hectares) refuge was established to protect, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona.

"A 2024 study found that, after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the launch site suffered egg damage or loss," the organization said in yesterday's statement. "Instead of taking any enforcement actions or working with SpaceX to reduce or eliminate its harm to the refuge, the Service [USFWS] is now citing the resulting degradation as justification for handing the public land to SpaceX."

Some of the land being transferred to SpaceX is part of the Palmito Ranch Battlefield National Historic Landmark, where the final battle of the Civil War was fought. This means the swap also violates the National Historic Preservation Act, according to the Center or Biological Diversity.

The Center or Biological Diversity and its partners also take issue with how the land deal was made.

"The proposed land exchange was first made public in March, but records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show internal agency planning began as early as April 2025," yesterday's statement reads. "In those discussions with the regional director of the Service, the agency developed 'the most expedited schedule possible' for completing a land transfer and recommended hiring additional staff to meet what they described as an 'optimum timeframe.'"

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the USFWS are the Center for Biological Diversity, Save RGV, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., and the South Texas Environmental Justice Network.

SpaceX launched a trailblazing satellite-servicing mission today (July 21).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 GMT).

SpaceX called today's launch MRV-MEV, because it's sending up a Mission Robotic Vehicle and three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs). These spacecraft will be operated by SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Virginia-based aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

MRV-MEV is headed to geostationary orbit (GEO), 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude, orbital speed matches the velocity of our planet's rotation, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over the same patch of ground continuously. For this reason, GEO is a popular destination for spy, communications and weather satellites.

The new mission will work to extend the lives of such satellites. The MRV is equipped with two 10-foot-long (3 meters) robotic arms, a system developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with the help of the Naval Research Laboratory. The spacecraft will use those arms to attach the MEPs — the first three ever to launch — to three separate satellites in GEO.

"Once installed, the MEP uses electric propulsion to provide orbit control and momentum unloading for a client satellite," Northrop Grumman wrote in an MEP fact sheet. "The MEP is controlled by the customer via a self-contained C- or Ku-band telemetry and command system, and [is] capable of providing up to eight years of life extension for a typical 2,000 kg satellite in GEO."

The Australian satellite operator Optus booked one of the MEPs, and Intelsat hired out the other two, according to Tech Times.

The MRV and MEPs will reach GEO separately. When it's rendezvous time, the robotic-armed spacecraft will grab an MEP and ferry it over to its client satellite, Tech Times reported. The MRV will then remain in GEO after it has installed the third MEP, waiting for other such "satellite jetpacks" to reach orbit.

In addition to installing MEPs, the MRV "can relocate, inspect, repair and upgrade spacecraft while in orbit," Northrop Grumman's website states.

"MRV includes a Northrop Grumman-developed Passive Refueling Module (PRM), the first refueling interface standard approved by the U.S. Space Force, which enables MRV to be refueled in orbit," it adds. "With advanced robotics technology and Northrop Grumman's proven experience in satellite servicing, the mission delivers an unprecedented capability and new class of system that can continuously evolve to support novel or increasingly advanced missions for our nation, making assets in space more resilient."

That "proven experience in satellite servicing" consists of two previous Northrop Grumman projects. Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) — the first-ever commercial satellite-servicing spacecraft — launched in October 2019 and successfully rendezvoused with its target in GEO (the communications satellite Intelsat 901) four months later. MEV-2 launched in August 2020 and docked with Intelsat 10-02 the following April.

Neither MEV-1 nor MEV-2 used Mission Extension Pods, however. Each of those previous efforts employed a single servicing craft, which made its way to the target satellite, docked and performed life-extension duties on its own.

All went according to plan during the launch: The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed the MRV 35.5 minutes after liftoff and the three MEPs at 10-minute intervals after that, according to SpaceX.

In a departure from most Falcon 9 missions, there was not a first-stage landing today.

"Due to the additional performance needed to launch these payloads to geosynchronous transfer orbit, this will be the 32nd and final flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-24, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19, and 27 Starlink missions," SpaceX's MRV-MEP mission description reads.

SpaceX's rocket-reuse record is 36 flights, set earlier this month during a Falcon 9 launch of the company's Starlink internet satellites.

MEV-MEP was SpaceX's second launch of the day. The company also sent 24 Starlink craft to orbit atop a Falcon 9 from California this morning.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:23 p.m. ET with news of successful liftoff. It was then updated again at 11:05 a.m. ET on July 22 with news of successful payload deployment, and to note DARPA's key role in this mission.

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back a few more days.

Elon Musk's company is now targeting Thursday (July 23) for Flight 13 of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle it's developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other spaceflight tasks.

If all goes to plan, the 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

It will be the second launch attempt for Starship Flight 13. The first came last Thursday (July 16) and ended in an abort, which occurred just as the giant rocket's 33 first-stage Raptor engines were firing up.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," Musk said on July 16 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX first targeted today (July 20) for Flight 13's second try. On Sunday (July 19), however, the company announced that it had pushed that date back to no earlier than Thursday.

Flight 13 will be the second launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), the latest, most advanced iteration of the megarocket. V3 is the variant that will land astronauts on the moon for NASA's Artemis program and fly SpaceX's first Mars missions, if all goes to plan.

The plan for the upcoming suborbital launch is similar to that of Flight 12, which lifted off on May 22. Starship's Super Heavy first stage will aim to steer itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Ship upper stage will do the same halfway around the world, off the coast of Western Australia.

SpaceX accomplished the latter objective on Flight 12 but not the former; Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth and ended up hitting the Gulf waters hard.

Flight 13 will do a few new things, however. For example, it will carry 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites, which have never flown to space before. SpaceX plans to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit over the coming years, and Starship will do all of the heavy lifting.

These 20 Starlinks won't stay aloft for long, however. Since Ship is flying on a suborbital trajectory, the satellites will come back to Earth relatively quickly — about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX's Flight 13 mission description.

Starship debuted in April 2023. All of its test flights to date have been suborbital.

Half a century after first putting hardware down on Mars, NASA is looking to explore the Red Planet's skies.

On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander touched down in the western reaches of Chryse Planitia (the "Golden Plain"), a large circular landform that lies 22.5 degrees north of the Martian equator.

It was the first-ever Mars landing for NASA. Viking 1, along with its twin Viking 2, went on to conduct the first fully successful mission on the Red Planet's surface. (The Soviet Union's Mars 3 probe survived its touchdown attempt on Dec. 2, 1971 but died less than two minutes later.) And those missions have left a rich and intriguing legacy.

Viking 1 and Viking 2 — which touched down in a different Red Planet region on Sept. 3, 1976 — were sent to the surface to search for signs of life on Mars. (Each mission also featured an orbiter, which studied the planet from above.)

The landers did this using three different experiments, two of which returned negative results. But the third, called Labeled Release (LR), was different. LR observed a steady stream of carbon dioxide gas coming from dirt into which it had introduced nutrients — a possible sign of microbial metabolism.

Some scientists deemed the LR results a likely life detection. But most disagreed, ascribing them to abiotic reactions and stressing that, overall, the Viking data paint a picture of a dead planet.

That disagreement illustrates one of the main legacies of the Viking program: It showed researchers that hunting for extraterrestrial life is a complicated business, and they needed to learn more about Mars before attempting the search again on the Red Planet.

NASA didn't send a surface craft to Mars for another two decades, a hiatus caused in part by the Vikings' ambiguous results and high price tag, as well as a shifting of funds to the nascent space shuttle program.

The dry spell was broken in July 1997, when the agency's Pathfinder lander touched down in Chryse Planitia, about 530 miles (850 kilometers) from Viking 1. The main goals of Pathfinder's mission were to demonstrate a new "faster, better, cheaper" method of Mars exploration, prove out a new airbag-based landing system and get a mobile robot onto the red dirt.

Pathfinder achieved all of these objectives, notching the third by deploying a small rover named Sojourner. The little wheeled robot stumbled across rounded pebbles — strong evidence that they had been exposed to flowing water.

This discovery helped shape a new NASA Mars exploration strategy, one that aims to make an informed search for alien life after "following the water." Life as we know it depends on water, so the agency built rovers designed to hunt for signs of past liquid water and potentially habitable environments.

The twin golf-cart-sized rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed in 2004, and the car-sized Curiosity followed suit in August 2012. Then came Perseverance, which landed inside Mars' Jezero Crater in February 2021.

All of these wheeled explorers found evidence of past aqueous environments. Curiosity and Perseverance — with their more extensive and sophisticated scientific payloads — delved even deeper, discovering complex organic molecules that may have been produced by life as we know it.

The two latter rovers are continuing their work; both remain active on the Red Planet. (Pathfinder and Sojourner operated for about three months; Spirit was declared dead in 2010 and Opportunity fell victim to a Mars dust storm in 2018.)

Perseverance has collected a variety of Mars samples, which NASA wants to return to Earth for detailed study. As the Vikings' experience suggests, such a level of intense scrutiny may be necessary to make a definitive detection of life on Mars, if it indeed exists. (Getting those samples home is not a foregone conclusion, however; NASA's original plan was deemed too expensive, and it's now looking into a new return strategy.)

Perseverance also carried a little robotic companion, which heralded a new phase of Red Planet exploration — the Ingenuity helicopter.

Ingenuity was a technology demonstration, designed to show that rotorcraft could effectively ply the thin Red Planet skies. (Mars' atmosphere is just 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea level.)

The $80 million mission was a rousing success. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity was expected to make just five short hops on Mars but ended up flying 72 times over the course of nearly three years of activity. (Its first flight occurred on April 19, 2021, and its last was on Jan. 18, 2024.)

So NASA aimed higher, drawing up plans for future helicopter missions that could collect valuable scientific data. And such a mission is on course to launch in 2028, if all goes according to plan: Skyfall, which will send three Ingenuity-like choppers to Mars on a nuclear-powered rocket.

"Equipped with a suite of scientific instruments, these aerial scouts will map hidden ice deposits and analyze weather patterns," NASA officials wrote in a description of Skyfall. "The mission will also demonstrate how aerial vehicles can generate wide terrain and subsurface maps to identify safe and resource-rich destinations for future American astronauts venturing to Mars."

And Skyfall could be just another step toward even more ambitious aerial exploration on the Red Planet. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built and operated Ingenuity, is looking into larger, more capable Mars helicopters that could do a wider variety of work on the Red Planet.

This is all part of Viking 1's legacy. That historic touchdown on Mars half a century ago lifted exploration up — all the way into the skies of another world.

An Indian company just made spaceflight history.

Skyroot Aerospace successfully launched its Vikram-1 rocket to low Earth orbit (LEO) early Saturday morning (July 18), making India just the third country with a private orbital launch capability. The other two are established space powers — the U.S. and China.

"It is the dawn of a new space era," one of Skyroot's commentators said during the company's launch webcast on Saturday.

Skyroot Aerospace is based in the central Indian city of Hyderabad and was founded in 2018. The company made history for the first time four years later with its Vikram-S suborbital rocket, becoming the first private Indian outfit ever to reach space.

Vikram-1 is the next step for Skyroot: an orbital vehicle. The four-stage, seven-story-tall rocket is a small-satellite launcher; it can haul about 770 pounds (350 kilograms) of payload to LEO, according to the company.

"The small satellite launch market is deeply constrained on the supply side," Skyroot co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 16).

"At the same time, the demand for services enabled by satellites in space will only continue to grow, and that is where Skyroot's opportunity lies," added Chandana, who, like company co-founder Naga Bharath Daka, used to work for the Indian Space Research Organisation.

The company began exploiting that opportunity on Saturday morning, with a test flight called Aagaman (Sanskrit for "Arrival"). The main goal was to see how Vikram-1 and its various systems performed during flight. But the rocket also carried some customer payloads, which were scheduled to be deployed at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers).

Those payloads included a technology demonstration from the German company DCUBED; the Solaras S3 nanosatellite pathfinder from Indian startup Grahaa Space; and Embrace, a robotic arm built by the Indian company Cosmoserve Space that's designed to capture space debris.

Vikram-1 also carried Skyroot's SCOPE satellite, which collected a variety of data to help the company assess the rocket's performance during flight. There were two symbolic payloads on board as well — a small, 18-karat gold rocket from the artist Ajay Kumar Mattewada and "Cosmic Bloom," which was designed by Cosmos Diamonds, a company that makes jewelry using lab-grown gems.

All of them made it to space safe and sound. Vikram-1 lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, on the Indian barrier island of Sriharikota, on Saturday at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT; 12:05 p.m. India Standard Time), roaring off the pad in a flash thanks to its first-stage solid rocket motor.

The rocket performed as planned, sticking to a nominal trajectory and deploying the payloads right on schedule. Vikram-1 had ticked all of its boxes by just 17 minutes after liftoff, leading to a pronouncement from mission control.

"The Vikram-1 Aagaman mission is a grand success," the mission director said, eliciting cheers from the folks in the room.

It was a big moment for Skyroot and for India, and it augurs big things to come, according to Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (retired), Director General of the Indian Space Association.

"The successful orbital launch of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 (Mission Aagaman) is a defining milestone for India’s space journey," Bhatt said in an emailed statement shortly after the mission wrapped up. "By executing the nation's first fully private orbital flight, Skyroot has shattered legacy boundaries, demonstrating that our domestic industry is primed to handle end-to-end space missions."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:25 a.m. ET on July 18 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

Update for 1:15 p.m. ET on July 17: SpaceX is now targeting Monday (July 20) for the launch of Starship Flight 13, during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT).

Starship wasn't quite ready to fly today (July 16).

SpaceX tried to launch the Starship megarocket on its 13th test flight today but couldn't quite pull it off. Something went wrong just as the giant vehicle's 33 first-stage Raptor engines started to fire up, and an abort was triggered.

"We'll take some time, dig into what triggered that abort once the booster was igniting to launch, and then we'll figure out what our path forward is going to be," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's launch webcast today.

It didn't take long for SpaceX to narrow in on the root cause and address it.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said this evening via X, the social media platform he owns.

Starship Flight 13 will fly from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. Today's attempt occurred at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local time), right at the beginning of a 90-minute launch window.

Flight 13 will be the second test launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), an upgraded variant of the megarocket designed to get it up to operational status.

V3's first jaunt, Flight 12 on May 22, was mostly successful, but there were a few issues. For example, Starship's Super Heavy first stage didn't steer itself back for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned, and the Ship upper stage wasn't able to relight one of its Raptor engines in space.

Starship V3 will get a second chance on Flight 13, whose goals are similar to those of Flight 12: Get Super Heavy down on target in the Gulf and send Ship most of the way around the world, for a controlled splashdown of its own off the coast of Western Australia. (Ship pulled that off on Flight 12.)

There are a few new objectives, however.

The most notable is the payload suite flying on Flight 13 — 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites. The company wants to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit using Starship, and Flight 13 will mark the satellites' first-ever trip to space.

They won't stay up there, however; the spacecraft will be deployed on Ship's suborbital trajectory and will crash back to Earth after about 20 minutes, according to SpaceX.

Six of the 20 Starlinks going up on Flight 13 will be equipped with cameras, to image Ship's heat shield. SpaceX did this with a couple of V2 Starlinks on Flight 12 as well.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:38 p.m. ET on July 16 with information from an Elon Musk X post.

Starship isn't the only SpaceX rocket flying today.

A Falcon 9 rocket launched from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today (July 16), carrying 21 satellites for the U.S. military's advanced new "Tranche 1 Transport Layer" (T1TL) constellation to orbit.

Liftoff took place at 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT; 1:32 p.m. local California time).

SpaceX's Starship megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — is slated to make its 13th test flight a few hours later. It will lift off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time).

SpaceX will stream that mission live, and Space.com will carry the feed. Coverage will begin about half an hour before launch.

Today's Falcon 9 flight helps assemble the T1TL, a network in low Earth orbit (LEO) that will be operated by the U.S. Space Force's Space Development Agency (SDA).

The T1TL "will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe," SDA officials wrote in a explainer.

The T1TL will eventually consist of 126 satellites, which will be built by York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Sixty-three of the spacecraft have now launched to date, on three Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg — one last September, another last October and today.

These 126 spacecraft will be part of a larger LEO network that the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

The PWSA is "a proliferated constellation of hundreds of optically linked small satellites, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), delivering capability at speed to the warfighter," SDA officials wrote in a Tranche 1 fact sheet.

"SDA leverages spiral development to deploy and proliferate new capability into a new generation of the PWSA every two years, called a 'tranche,' to continually increase capability used by the warfighter," they added.

Everything went according to plan today, at least during the mission's early stages. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff for a landing in the Pacific Ocean, on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." According to a SpaceX mission description, it was the fourth flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1103.

The Falcon 9's upper stage continued hauling the 21 satellites to LEO. We don't know when or exactly where they'll be deployed; the SpaceX mission description doesn't provide that information, and the company cut off its launch webcast shortly after booster landing at the request of the SDA.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:44 p.m. ET on July 16 with news of successful launch and booster landing.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will take to the skies again on Monday (July 20), and you can watch the thundering action live.

Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday — the 57th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 moon landing, by the way — during a 90-minute widow that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). It will be Starship's 13th flight overall and its second mission of 2026. (SpaceX originally tried to launch Flight 13 on Thursday, July 16, but that attempt was aborted at the last second.)

You can watch Starship Flight 13 live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX; coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff. Follow our Starship live blog for updates and other news about the test flight.

A potentially revolutionary rocket

Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage vehicle known (somewhat confusingly) as Starship, or simply Ship. Both elements are made of stainless steel and are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

The stacked vehicle stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall and can carry more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit. SpaceX thinks Starship's combination of power and reusability will revolutionize spaceflight, allowing humanity to settle the moon and Mars, among other bold exploration feats.

Starship debuted in April 2023 and has flown 11 more suborbital flights since, most recently on May 22. That Flight 12 test was the first mission for Starship Version 3 (V3), an advanced iteration of the megarocket that was many months in the making. (Flight 11, the last launch of Starship V2, lifted off in October 2025.)

Starship V3 will be the first operational variant of the vehicle. It will fly on NASA's Artemis III mission to Earth orbit in 2027, for example, and land the agency's Artemis IV astronauts on the moon a year later, if all goes to plan.

Starship V3 performed quite well during its launch debut in May. During Flight 12, Ship successfully deployed 22 payloads via its "PEZ dispenser" slit — 20 dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites and two actual Starlinks equipped with imaging sensors — and came back to Earth in one piece, splashing down as planned off the coast of Western Australia.

There were a few hiccups, however. Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth, for instance, and ended up crashing in the Gulf of Mexico rather than making a controlled splashdown there.

SpaceX will run it back on Flight 13, shooting mostly for the same objectives that Flight 12 targeted — with a few notable exceptions.

The plan for Starship Flight 13

Eventually, SpaceX plans to return both Super Heavy and Ship directly to the launch pad after liftoff, catching each with the "chopstick" arms attached to Starbase's two launch towers. (Starship will also fly from Florida and perhaps other places as well in the coming years; these future pads will have chopstick arms, too.) This strategy will allow each vehicle to fly multiple times per day, according to the company.

SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times to date, but it's been a while; the last such snag came on Flight 8 in March 2025. And the company has never tried a chopsticks catch with Ship.

Those trends will continue on Flight 13. If all goes to plan, Super Heavy will steer its way to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (which the Trump administration has renamed the Gulf of America) about seven minutes after launch.

"The booster’s primary test objective will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 13 mission description. "There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight."

Ship will again target a splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, which will occur about 65 minutes after launch. And the vehicle will again deploy some objects into suborbital space — but here's where Flight 13 will break new ground.

Those objects will be 20 V3 Starlink satellites — next-gen versions of the broadband spacecraft, which will "greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds," SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to operate up to 100,000 V3 Starlinks in low Earth orbit — a bold plan, considering that the current megaconstellation, the largest such network ever assembled, contains "only" about 10,800 spacecraft.

The Starlink V3 plan will require thousands of launches — a load that's beyond even the capabilities of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew 165 times in 2025. (Adding to the difficulty: Starship V3 satellites are considerably heavier than their predecessors. Each one will apparently weigh around 4,400 pounds, or 2,000 kilograms.)

The 20 Starlink V3 satellites "will extend solar arrays and antennas and will attempt to connect with the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers," SpaceX wrote in the Flight 13 description. "The Starlink satellites will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to demise upon reentry approximately 20 minutes after deployment."

Six of the 20 spacecraft are equipped with cameras, which they will use to scan and study Ship's heat-shield tiles. SpaceX wants to gather more data about the heat-shield system before it attempts to bring Ship back to the launch pad for a chopsticks catch.

And SpaceX won't just passively observe the heat shield during Flight 13; it will conduct some experiments as well.

For example, the shield "will have load-sensing tiles to take measurements as the vehicle experiences higher dynamic pressure on ascent than previous flights, putting added stress on the tile attachments in exchange for increased payload-to-orbit capability," the mission description reads.

So there will indeed be some new things to look out for during Flight 13. And watching the world's biggest and brawniest rocket lift off is a treat no matter what sort of mission it's flying, so be sure to tune in!

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:25 p.m. ET on July 17 with the new target launch date of July 20.

The International Space Station has three new residents.

NASA's Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT; 7:47 p.m. local time in Baikonur), heading toward the orbiting lab.

Their Soyuz executed nominal side booster separation about two minutes after launch, followed by second stage separation about 2.5 minutes later, as the rocket flew at 105 miles (169 kilometers) in altitude. Third stage orbital insertion and separation was completed at about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, putting Russia's Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft and crew on course to chase down the International Space Station (ISS).

The trio caught up to the ISS after just two orbits, docking with the outpost at 1:52 p.m. EDT (1752 GMT). The two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Mediterranean Sea at the time, NASA officials said during the agency's docking webcast.

That webcast will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) ahead of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is expected around 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).

The MS-29 trio will join the seven astronauts already living aboard the ISS — NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

This is the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency's Group 23. He's married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.

Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX, she flew on the company's Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten.

Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company's first-ever flight surgeon.

MS-29's flight is the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spent five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.

Kikina, the only female member of Russia's active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX's Crew-5 mission. That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.

The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.

"He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices," NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory.

"Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions," they added.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 1:55 p.m. ET with news of successful docking.

The first of perhaps tens of thousands of sunlight-directing space mirrors just got cleared for liftoff.

California-based startup Reflect Orbital just got a license from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate its first demonstration satellite, a spacecraft that will unfurl a reflective surface that measures about 60 feet (18 meters) on a side.

That satellite, called Eärendil-1 is targeted to fly later this year. And it could be the first of many: Reflect Orbital aims to operate 50,000 or more such mirror-craft in low Earth orbit by 2035, beaming reflected sunlight down to a variety of customers on the surface.

"We're grateful to the FCC for recognizing the importance of testing novel technologies in space," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's co-founder and CEO, said in an emailed statement on Friday (July 10).

"This license is the first step toward rigorously testing our technology's efficacy and the safeguards we have developed," he added. "We're excited to demonstrate how our technology works and to introduce transformative, clean technology the world urgently needs."

That technology could aid a variety of industries and endeavors, according to Reflect Orbital.

"Imagine the endless possibilities when sunlight is not limited by geography or time of day," the company's website reads. "A search-and-rescue team locates a missing person in minutes. A city has safer, evenly lit streets without the carbon emissions. Construction projects complete in half the time with teams able to work through the night safely."

The planned mirror constellation will also boost the productivity of solar arrays on Earth, allowing them to take more of the electricity-generating load from polluting options such as fossil fuels, according to the company.

Not everybody is thrilled about Reflect Orbital's plans, however. Satellite megaconstellations in general are controversial. Some folks object to how they're changing the night sky, for example, and others worry that deorbiting huge numbers of satellites will pollute Earth's atmosphere with heavy metals.

There are some specific concerns about Reflect Orbital's plans as well — namely, that it will introduce a new type of light pollution for people and ecosystems to deal with.

"The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation," John Barentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory in Tucson, Arizona and a consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, previously told Space.com.

"That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well," he added.

Reflect Orbital stresses that it will do its best to minimize such potential impacts.

"We design for safety in three ways: 1) the light is contained within the spot, 2) the light can be turned off quickly and at any time so that none of it reaches the Earth, and 3) we can intentionally avoid sensitive areas like research observatories or protected habitats," the company's website states.

"The light is not bright enough to start fires or harm eyes, even when viewed through a telescope, and cannot be concentrated past maximum natural sunlight irradiance," it adds.

A SpaceX rocket just inched closer to the record books.

A Falcon 9 vehicle lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California tonight (July 10) at 11:01 p.m. EDT (8:01 p.m. local time; 0301 GMT on July 11), carrying 29 of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 35th flight for this rocket's first stage, a booster designated B1071. The SpaceX record is 36, set just a few days ago by B1067 on another Starlink mission.

And, there will likely be more flights for B1071 down the road. The booster came back to Earth for a touchdown tonight as planned, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" about 8.5 minutes after launch.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 29 Starlink satellites aloft. They're scheduled to be deployed in LEO about 62 minutes after launch.

The Starlink megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell. The network is growing all the time, however, and it could eventually get very large indeed; SpaceX recently applied for approval to operate 100,000 of the spacecraft in LEO.

Tonight's launch was the 81st Falcon 9 mission of 2026. About 80% of them have been Starlink flights.

A lot has changed since NASA last sent astronauts to the moon — including the attitudes of those space explorers.

That's the view of Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut who served as pilot on the Artemis 2 mission around the moon's far side this past April.

"When you look back on the Apollo missions, there was a lot more competition back in the office. Everybody wanted to be the first, and then everybody wanted to be the next," Glover told Angels Broadcast Television on June 12, shortly before he threw out the first pitch before a baseball game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Tampa Bay Rays.

"I think our office learned a lot from them," he added. "There are some good things about that. It makes you work really hard, but it also can create some unnecessary conflict. And so my office really wants to support everybody — wants you to be the guy that does it, and somebody just gets picked to do it, and that's OK."

Glover and his Artemis 2 crewmates — NASA's Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — did indeed seem to forge a very strong bond during their training and their time in space.

For example, shortly before Artemis 2's April 1 launch, Glover, Koch and Hansen came up with a plan to name a crater on the moon after Wiseman's wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

"They said the three of them had talked, and they would like to do this," Wiseman said on April 6, the day Artemis 2 looped around the moon and got farther from Earth than any crewed mission ever had. "That was an emotional moment for me. And I just thought that was just a total treasure, that they had thought through this, and they had offered this."

Wiseman, Artemis 2's commander, said he broke down when Hansen radioed mission control with the naming request. In fact, all four astronauts were overcome with emotion at that moment.

"That was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on that day ahead," Wiseman said.

The atmosphere was a bit different during the 1960s and early 1970s, as Glover noted; undercurrents of competition and rivalry reportedly ran through the Apollo crews.

For example, multiple people, including Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, have said that Buzz Aldrin lobbied to be the first person to set foot on the moon, an honor that eventually went to Apollo 11 crewmate Neil Armstrong. (Aldrin has disputed this version of events, saying he didn't want to be the first-ever moonwalker.)

There are other big differences between Artemis and Apollo, of course. Apollo was designed to get people to the moon before the Soviet Union could do so, a goal that was regarded as a national security imperative because it would demonstrate American technological supremacy. As a result of this need for speed, Apollo did not build anything permanent on the moon, leaving behind only flags, footprints and defunct spacecraft.

Artemis, on the other hand, aims to establish a permanent and sustainable presence on Earth's nearest neighbor. If all goes to plan, NASA will build one or more moon bases near the lunar south pole, then use the skills and knowledge gained from this endeavor to get astronauts even farther afield — to Mars.

SpaceX just launched a brand-new return capsule that it has been developing in the dark.

That vehicle, called Starfall, lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket this morning (June 23), on a test mission designed to show that it can fly in a controlled fashion and survive the fiery trip down through Earth's atmosphere.

The demonstration flight may have caught some space fans by surprise, for SpaceX has revealed little about Starfall to date. And that air of secrecy extended through today's launch; the company cut off its webcast about 10 minutes after liftoff, a practice usually associated with national security missions.

SpaceX provided a very brief overview of Starfall today, saying via X that the new vehicle "will enable affordable, routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing."

Details about the vehicle are harder to come by — but we have some, thanks to an environmental assessment published by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last month. That report looked at the potential environmental impact of two Starfall demonstration reentries, one or both of which was set in motion by today's launch. (It's unclear how many Starfall vehicles the Falcon 9 lofted on this initial flight.)

According to the FAA document, Starfall is a disk-shaped spacecraft that stands about 2.5 feet (0.75 meters) tall, with a diameter of 10.2 feet (3.1 m). It weighs roughly 4,600 pounds (2,100 kilograms) and can carry about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) of payload. The vehicle can launch on both the workhorse Falcon 9 and Starship, the megarocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

Starfall consists of two parts: an aluminum "top plate" that weighs about 3,090 pounds (1,400 kg) and a detachable carbon-fiber heat shield. Cargo rides in the top plate, which features a payload bay 8.2 feet long, 4.9 feet wide and 1.6 feet tall (2.5 by 1.5 by 0.5 m).

For comparison, SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which routinely flies people and cargo to and from the International Space Station, stands about 14.7 feet (4.5 m) tall, with a diameter of 13.0 feet (4.0 m). Dragon can haul about 13,230 pounds (6,000 kg) to low Earth orbit and bring 6,600 pounds (3,000 kg) back down, according to its SpaceX specifications page.

Starfall is not capable of carrying astronauts. And, in another departure from Dragon, the newly debuted return vehicle does not have a traditional propulsion system.

It has only "an attitude control system which uses compressed inert gas (for example, compressed nitrogen gas) to perform small attitude control maneuvers, such as pointing the capsule's heat shield in the correct direction to safely reenter Earth's atmosphere," the FAA's assessment reads.

"Capsules do not have the ability to de-orbit themselves and can only control their attitude," it adds. "Individual capsules would reenter Earth's atmosphere on a pre-planned trajectory and splash down with the assistance of parachutes."

That splashdown — at least of the first two Starfall vehicles — will take place in the open Pacific Ocean, about 700 nautical miles (1,300 kilometers) off the west coast of the United States. Starfall, and its cargo, will then be collected by recovery boats.

SpaceX has two main goals for Starfall, according to the FAA document. The vehicle will "enable point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines" and also "create a self-sustaining commercial in-space manufacturing market by offering access to microgravity and vacuum, loiter on orbit, and safe return from orbit as a service at scale."

SpaceX isn't alone in pursuing these opportunities. For example, the California-based company Varda Space has already launched and landed five of its 650-pound (300 kg) "W-series" spacecraft, which are designed to be both orbital mini-factories and return capsules.

And another California outfit, Outpost Space, is developing a line of "CarryAll" return vehicles that can get very large payloads — those weighing up to 22,000 pounds (10,000 kg) — down from space with pinpoint accuracy, within 80 feet (25 m) of a target anywhere on Earth.

The CarryAll Block 3 will be a "flagship vehicle for in-space manufacturing and warehousing, Earth return, military resilience and humanitarian aid," Outpost's website states.

So SpaceX is not breaking new ground with Starfall. But the company is poised to play a leading role in the nascent Earth-return field, thanks to its launch dominance and vertical integration.

The Falcon 9 flew a whopping 165 times in 2025, after all, and SpaceX envisions launching Starship thousands of times per year when that massive rocket comes fully online. So it shouldn't be too difficult for SpaceX to send hundreds of Starfall vehicles up and then back down again, delivering space-made pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods to customers around the world.

SpaceX just notched a remarkable launch-dominance milestone.

Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years.

Investor and former space-industry executive Christian Keil highlighted the achievement in a June 12 X post, which noted that SpaceX had launched 15,262 satellites as of that date. The combined total for all other companies and organizations since the dawn of the space age in 1957 was 15,138, according to Keil.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The company was not an instant success; its first three launches, with the homegrown Falcon 1 rocket, were failures. SpaceX finally broke through with a Falcon 1 success in 2008. A fourth straight failure probably would have been the end of the company, Musk has said.

SpaceX soon moved on to the Falcon 9 rocket, which debuted in 2010 and remains the company's workhorse; it flew a whopping 165 times in 2025.

Most of those launches — nearly 75% of them, in fact — were devoted to building out Starlink, the broadband megaconstellation SpaceX has assembled in low Earth orbit (LEO).

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of objects that SpaceX has launched to date are Starlink satellites. As of June 18, the company has sent 12,318 of the internet spacecraft to LEO, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

That number will continue growing far into the future, as Starlink could someday have 40,000 or more satellites.

And SpaceX is dreaming even bigger than that. Musk recently announced that he wants to operate a million data centers in space, as part of SpaceX's transition from a pure launch concern to a company focused heavily on artificial intelligence.

These spacecraft will be lofted by SpaceX's Starship megarocket, which is still in the test flight phase. Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX has teased a future that features thousands of Starship flights every year as the company helps humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other ambitious tasks. So, it's safe to say that SpaceX doesn't plan to relinquish its launch lead anytime soon.