SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit today (Aug. 8) from California's scenic central coast.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 GMT; 9:35 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the internet-beaming spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The rocket's first stage returned to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 16th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1093.

B1093's most recent flight before today was on July 14, when it launched 27 Starlink satellites to LEO from Vandenberg.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage continued carrying the 24 Starlink satellites toward LEO today, deploying them about 61 minutes after liftoff as planned.

Today's launch was the 92nd Falcon 9 liftoff of 2026, and the 71st of the year devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

Starlink, by far the largest orbiting network ever assembled, currently consists of more than 10,900 active satellites — and it's growing all the time.

As usual, SpaceX is dreaming big.

The company plans to build factories on the moon, using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call.

"We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon," he said. "We're going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that."

This is not a newly revealed vision; Musk first laid it out in February, in a blog post that announced SpaceX's purchase of xAI, a company that the billionaire entrepreneur founded in 2023. But Musk doubled down on it this week, showing investors that off-Earth manufacturing is very much front-of-mind for SpaceX.

The factories in question will build SpaceX's Starmind AI satellites, if all goes according to plan. The company aims to operate a million-strong Starmind constellation in Earth orbit in the coming years, and then go farther afield with the craft after that.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to launch locally made Starmind satellites off the lunar surface using electromagnetic mass drivers — basically, extremely powerful rail guns.

"Using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon — which, I know it sounds, like, super sci-fi right now, but it's going to happen — will enable us to build the mass accelerator on the moon," Musk said.

"And if you have a mass accelerator on the moon, and you have solar and radiator production on the moon, you can — I know this sounds totally nuts — but you can you can probably scale to 1,000 times the economy of Earth in terms of intelligence launched to space, but probably, you know, maybe even a million times," he added.

"Solar and radiator production" refers to the manufacture of key Starmind satellite components: solar panels to power them and radiators to dump the large amounts of heat they'll produce into the vacuum of space.

Musk didn't provide details about the robotic lunar labor force. But he's presumably counting on Optimus, a humanoid robot built by another one of his companies, the carmaker Tesla. Musk has previously said that SpaceX will launch some Optimus units to Mars in the near future, to help pave the way for human settlement of the Red Planet.

Those robots will fly on Starship, SpaceX's fully reusable next-gen megarocket, which is currently gearing up for its 14th test flight. Indeed, Starship is key to most of the company's plan's both in Earth orbit and beyond.

"Starship aims to quadruple payload capacity and reduce launch costs by 10 times compared to our Falcon 9 rocket, unlocking significant capabilities across all of our business segments," SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said during Tuesday's earnings call.

"We continue to make progress building the infrastructure required to support thousands of Starship launches per year, including accelerating Raptor and launch vehicle production, the buildout of our gigabays, and making significant progress towards activating multiple launch pads at Starbase and in Cape Canaveral at Pad 39A and Pad 37," he added. (Raptor is the engine that powers Starship, and Starbase is SpaceX's South Texas site, which serves as the current hub of Starship manufacturing, testing and launch activities.)

Tuesday's call was a landmark for SpaceX — its first as a publicly traded company. Musk founded SpaceX as a private concern in March 2022 and took it public this past June, via the richest IPO in history.

The IPO raised $86 billion and valued SpaceX at $1.77 trillion. Only six American companies had higher market capitalizations at the time — NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and the semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. (Market caps fluctuate all the time, going up and down with companies' stock prices.)

The main point of Tuesday's call was to discuss SpaceX's first-ever earnings report, which covered the second quarter of this year. The company's revenue over that stretch was $7.8 billion, a 92% increase over the same period in 2025, according to the report. SpaceX lost more money than it made during Q2 2026, but the shortfall was considerably smaller than in Q2 2025 — $541 million versus $1.0 billion.

It looks like Starship's two-week-long ocean adventure won't have a happy ending.

The SpaceX megarocket conducted its 13th test flight on July 24, lifting off from the company's Starbase site in South Texas. Things went pretty well on Flight 13, especially for Starship's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage, known as Ship, which splashed down as planned in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

In an unexpected first, Ship survived that homecoming, staying in one piece even after toppling over and hitting the waves. It remains intact still, and SpaceX is towing it toward shore in Western Australia to get a better look. But the ambitious effort is unlikely to succeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told us today (Aug. 7).

"Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now. Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades," Musk wrote this afternoon via X, the social media site he owns.

He was responding to a SpaceX post from an hour or so earlier, which provided an update about the recovery effort and shared two photos and a video of the activities.

The recovery team has "been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port," SpaceX wrote in the post.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing about 408 feet (124 meters) tall when stacked. Both of its stages — Ship and the Super Heavy booster — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will revolutionize spaceflight.

A key enabler of rapid reuse is Ship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during its downward trips through Earth's atmosphere. Musk has described heat shield development as perhaps the biggest challenge on Starship's road to operational flight — but that challenge may now be in the rearview mirror.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4), during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call.

It's no surprise that Starship and Flight 13 came up in that call. The megarocket is key to SpaceX's ambitious future plans, which include assembling and operating a million-satellite AI constellation in Earth orbit.

Flight 13 was similar to previous Starship test missions; it was a suborbital jaunt that ended with Super Heavy coming down in the Gulf of Mexico and Ship landing in the Indian Ocean.

There was a big milestone, however, in addition to Ship's unexpected transition to seagoing vessel: During its time in space, the upper stage deployed 20 functional Starlink V3 satellites, the bigger, next-gen variant of SpaceX's broadband spacecraft.

These satellites quickly came back down to Earth on July 24, but Flight 13 was a vision of the future nonetheless. SpaceX wants to operate a constellation of 100,000 or so Starlink V3s, and this network will be lofted by Starship.

A private rescue spacecraft is having troubles of its own in Earth orbit.

LINK, a satellite built and operated by the Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies, launched July 3 on a daring and unprecedented mission: Rendezvous with NASA's Swift space telescope and boost the observatory to a higher orbit before it falls out of the sky.

About three weeks after launch, however, LINK started spinning at an unexpected rate, a problem that caused a temporary communications dropout and a reset of its satellite platform. And two of LINK's three orientation-controlling reaction wheels stopped working.

Spacecraft operators always work hard to fix such problems when they crop up, but there's a special urgency where LINK is concerned. It needs to reach Swift soon, or atmospheric drag will pull the observatory — which possesses no thrusters of its own — down past a point of no return. NASA thinks this boundary lies at around 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth, an altitude that Swift is expected to reach by October.

So the original plan called for LINK to meet up with Swift in early August, just a month after launch — pretty much as soon as commissioning work on the rescue craft wrapped up. That's not going to happen at this point, but mission teams haven't given up on the rescue attempt. Indeed, they're making progress on getting LINK back up to speed, as a new update relates.

"LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift," NASA officials wrote in the update, which the agency posted on Thursday (Aug. 6).

"Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second," they added. "Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission."

Those next steps include uploading flight software updates "with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration," NASA officials wrote. "These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit."

The updates are expected to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to the update.

Swift — officially known as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the universe.

The $250 million telescope's initial altitude was about 375 miles (600 km). But it has fallen considerably since then, and the descent is accelerating: The lower Swift goes, the more atmosphere it encounters and the greater the force of frictional drag becomes.

Swift is still working just fine, which explains why NASA wants to save it. Last September, the agency awarded Katalyst $30 million to build LINK — a refrigerator-sized spacecraft with three robotic arms — and fly its rescue mission.

That's a very tight timeline, but Katalyst hit it, getting LINK ready by its launch date and checking off a number of commissioning milestones before running into trouble. The company has experience delivering under pressure, so maybe it can pull off the rescue craft's rescue before it's too late.

A Japanese Earth-observing satellite got to orbit early this morning (Aug. 6), five weeks later than originally planned.

The spacecraft — a radar satellite that will be operated by the Tokyo-based company iQPS — lifted off atop a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle from New Zealand today at 5:18 a.m. EDT (0918 GMT; 9:18 p.m. local time).

It was a deferred round two for the mission: Rocket Lab originally tried to launch it on June 30 but aborted that attempt at the last second. The company has not yet revealed what caused that abort.

Everything went well on this morning's flight, which Rocket Lab called "The Grain Goddess Provides." The Electron deployed the iQPS satellite into its target orbit about 357 miles (575 kilometers) above Earth, Rocket Lab announced via X this morning.

The spacecraft — known as QPS-SAR-13 or MIKURA-I, after a Japanese goddess associated with abundance and prosperity — will study our planet using high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which can peer through clouds and collect imagery both day and night.

iQPS is building a constellation of 36 such SAR satellites in low Earth orbit. Electron is the primary launcher for this network; "The Grain Goddess Provides" was the eighth of a total of 15 launches that Rocket Lab will conduct to help assemble the constellation.

Today's mission was the 92nd overall for Rocket Lab and the company's 13th of 2026. Most of these flights have involved the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, the company's workhorse small-satellite launcher. But a growing number these days are performed by HASTE, a suborbital variant of Electron that allows customers to test technologies in a hypersonic flight environment.

And we could soon see an increase in the cadence of HASTE liftoffs. Rocket Lab recently signed a $266 million contract with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 suborbital missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska, a new launch locale for the company.

The final resting place of SpaceX's moon-smashing rocket has been found.

The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, known as Danuri, has captured imagery of the crater blasted out by the Falcon 9 upper stage that slammed into the moon early on Wednesday morning (Aug. 5).

"Danuri began observations about 30 minutes before the collision and, through orbit control, passed over the impact site multiple times, conducting a total of 8 imaging sessions," officials with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) said via X this morning (Aug. 6). "Through this observation, changes in the terrain around the impact site and traces of ejecta spread were confirmed."

"Danuri secured both pre-collision and immediate post-collision footage, enabling analysis of changes caused solely by the collision and providing important research data," they added in the X post, which shared several before-and-after images of the impact site.

The Falcon 9 in question launched on Jan. 15, 2025, sending two private robotic moon landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience — to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit. The duo then made their own way to the moon; Blue Ghost landed successfully on March 2 of that year, but Resilience crashed during its touchdown attempt.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth shortly after liftoff for recovery and reuse, as such boosters commonly do. Falcon 9 upper stages, by contrast, are expendable. SpaceX usually disposes of them in Earth's atmosphere, but the upper stage on the Blue Ghost-Resilience mission used almost all of its fuel getting its payloads to their distant destination. So the 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) rocket body remained up there, orbiting Earth — until solar activity and gravitational forces pushed it on a collision course for the moon.

That collision occurred at 2:34 a.m. EDT (0634 GMT) on Wednesday, according to KARI officials — right in line with predictions. Scientists calculated some other parameters ahead of time as well. For example, the rocket body probably hit the moon at about 5,400 mph (8,690 kph), gouging out a crater up to 89 feet (27 meters) wide.

The new observations by Danuri, as well as future work by other lunar probes, will help verify such predictions.

"The observation data secured by Danuri will be linked with follow-up observations from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and utilized in international collaborative research," KARI officials said in the X post.

It may be that some ground-based telescopes caught the impact as well. Astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain believe they captured a video of ejected material blasting off of the lunar surface around the predicted time of impact:

The Falcon 9 upper stage wasn't the first rocket body to slam into the moon. The third stage of a Chinese Long March 3C crashed into the lunar surface on March 4, 2022, for example. And the third stage of NASA's Saturn V rocket gouged out craters during multiple Apollo moon missions.

Danuri is South Korea's first lunar probe. The spacecraft launched on Aug. 4, 2022 atop a Falcon 9 and began circling the moon four months later. It carries six payloads, five of them provided by Korean universities and research organizations. The sixth is a NASA instrument called ShadowCam, which hunts for signs of water ice in permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles.

Blue Origin is close to figuring out why its New Glenn rocket went boom a few months ago.

The explosion — which destroyed the rocket and some key pieces of pad infrastructure — occurred on May 28 during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working hard ever since to determine the cause of the anomaly, and it has made considerable progress, according to a new update.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said via X on Wednesday afternoon (Aug. 5). "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

Like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn features a reusable first stage, which is powered by seven BE-4s and designed to launch at least 25 times. The heavy lifter is a big part of Blue Origin's ambitious plans, which include helping humanity establish a foothold in the final frontier.

"The rocket is engineered with the safety and redundancy required to fly humans, and will enable our vision of building a road to space for the benefit of Earth," Blue Origin's website states.

The company, and NASA, are counting on the rocket to get important hardware to the moon. New Glenn will be the ride for Blue Origin's Blue Moon, one of two crewed landers that NASA picked to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

And there's an important Blue Moon mission coming up: the first test flight of the prototype Mark 1 lander, which is scheduled to make an uncrewed lunar touchdown by the end of this year, if possible. That mission will help prove out the vehicle's capabilities ahead of crewed flights.

New Glenn debuted in January 2025 and has flown two more times since, in November 2025 and April 19 of this year. There was an issue on that most recent launch, which carried up AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite: New Glenn failed to deploy the payload into the proper orbit, and it was lost.

Despite that issue, and the May 28 explosion, Limp expressed confidence that Blue Origin will soon get New Glenn up and running again.

"The path forward is clear," he added in Wednesday's X post. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis."

SpaceX will make some history this month, if all goes according to plan.

The company aims to launch the 14th test flight of its Starship megarocket before August is out, Elon Musk said today (Aug. 4) during SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call. Starship will deploy viable payloads into orbit on Flight 14, something it has never done before — and there will be other unprecedented action as well.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said during today's call.

"Ship" is the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage of Starship, which also features a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a breakthrough that, combined with Starship's immense power, will revolutionize spaceflight, according to SpaceX.

And "things look very good" is a reference to Starship Flight 13, which lifted off on July 24. Musk was talking specifically about Ship's performance on that suborbital jaunt, which ended with the upper stage's soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

Ship's heat shield survived the harrowing downward trip through Earth's atmosphere in great shape on Flight 13, according to SpaceX (as did the entire vehicle, which is still in one piece to this day). And that gives SpaceX confidence to plan for a tower catch on Flight 14 — a crucial component of Starship's future reusability.

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said.

Starship's two launch towers at its Starbase site in South Texas feature large "chopstick" arms, which stack Super Heavy and Ship atop the pad — and can also catch the vehicles when they come back to Earth at the end of their missions.

SpaceX has already executed a tower catch with Super Heavy on three Starship test flights, but it has not yet tried to do so with Ship. So Flight 14 could be momentous, provided SpaceX gets permission from regulators to make an attempt.

Flight 14 will also carry up a batch of SpaceX's V3 Starlink satellites, a larger and more capable version of the spacecraft that currently populate the company's broadband megaconstellation. Flight 13 toted 20 Starlink V3s, but Ship deployed them into suborbital space; the satellites will be placed into an operational orbit on the upcoming mission, if all goes to plan, Musk said.

SpaceX goes public

Musk founded SpaceX as a private company back in March 2002. It stayed that way until this past June 12, when SpaceX went public via the richest IPO in history, which raised $86 billion and valued the company at $1.77 trillion.

SpaceX now has to provide earnings reports every quarter, starting with Q2 of this year. And these first publicized numbers show considerable improvement compared to a year ago, according to the company.

The newly released report states that total revenue in the March-June time period was up 92% over the same stretch in 2025 — $7.8 billion versus $4.1 billion. And SpaceX had a net loss during this span of $541 million, down from a net loss of $1.0 billion in Q2 2025.

More than half of this quarter's revenue — about $4.3 billion — came via the company's Starlink satellite-internet megaconstellation. That number crystallizes a truth that has been apparent for a while now — SpaceX is not just a launch company anymore.

Rockets will bring in a smaller and smaller share of SpaceX revenue over the coming years, if all goes according to plan. Launch will continue ceding this financial ground to Starlink, but also, increasingly, to SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI) operations.

Indeed, SpaceX sees itself becoming more and more of an AI outfit over time. A few months ago, the company revealed that, over the long haul, it's targeting a "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion per year, nearly $23 trillion of which will be in the field of "enterprise AI applications." That's quite an ambitious goal; in 2025, the gross domestic product of the entire United States was a little less than $31 trillion.

Speaking of ambitious: SpaceX plans to make a lot of this money via an orbiting constellation of one million AI data centers, which together will comprise a constellation known as Starmind. (Yes, SpaceX has a thing for "Star" names.)

SpaceX expects to start launching operational Starmind spacecraft in 2027, Musk said during today's call. It will take a lot of Starship launches to get the network up and running, but he doesn't see that as a bottleneck.

"We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly, and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more," Musk said.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying three of AST SpaceMobile's massive direct-to-cell BlueBird satellites launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT) on Wednesday, minutes after the opening of its 96-minute window.

Today's launch further expands AST SpaceMobile's constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which will beam internet service directly to unmodified smartphones once operational.

The newcomers bring the total number of BlueBird spacecraft launched to 13 and marks a significant milestone toward getting the constellation fully up and running, according to AST SpaceMobile.

"This orbital launch, combined with expanded manufacturing capacity and the recent successful launch and deployment of BlueBird satellites 8, 9, and 10, position us for beta services later this year with our space-based cellular broadband coverage," Scott Wisniewski, the company's president, said in a July 28 statement.

AST SpaceMobile began assembling its constellation with "Block 1" spacecraft, which have communications arrays that cover 693 square feet (64.4 square meters) when unfurled.

That's pretty big, but the company upped the ante with BlueBird 6, which reached LEO atop an Indian LVM3 rocket in December 2025. That was the first "next-generation" BlueBird, a class whose antennas cover a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square m).

Prior to today's launch, there had been four next-gen BlueBirds in LEO — numbers 6, 8, 9 and 10. (BlueBird 7 was lost shortly after liftoff this past April after its Blue Origin New Glenn rocket suffered an anomaly.) So, BlueBirds 11 through 13 nearly double the off-Earth population.

"These next-generation BlueBird satellites are expected to deliver nearly double the peak download speeds achieved by the company's initial Block 1 BlueBird satellites, which recently demonstrated peak download speeds of 98.9 Mbps directly to standard smartphones," AST SpaceMobile wrote in the same statement.

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

It was the 30th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. The rocket also flew the BlueBird 8-10 mission in June.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, went on to deploy the three BlueBird satellites into LEO over an 11-minute span beginning 53.5 minutes after liftoff.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5 a.m. ET on Aug. 5 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

SpaceX has launched yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites to the final frontier.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Aug. 4) at 1:05 p.m. EDT (1705 GMT; 10:05 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the broadband spacecraft toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

It was the 90th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year and the 70th of 2026 devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation.

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes after launch, touching down on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 34th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1063.

That's just two flights shy of the Falcon 9 reuse record, which was set last month on a different Starlink launch.

If all goes according to plan, the 24 Starlink satellites will be deployed into LEO about 61 minutes after liftoff. They'll join quite a few other spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation — nearly 10,900 at last count.

There's some other SpaceX action on tap today as well. At 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT), the company will host a webcast to discuss its first-ever public earnings report, which covers the second quarter of 2026. You can listen live via SpaceX's X account.

SpaceX was a private company from its founding in 2002 until mid-June of this year, when Elon Musk took it public in the largest IPO in history.

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.