We now have a launch date for Starship's most ambitious mission to date.

SpaceX announced today (Sept. 15) that it's targeting Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If all goes according to plan on Sept. 22, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will complete six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers). The vehicle will then maneuver its way to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rocket Lab just launched a mystery mission to orbit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concentrations of dangerous pollutants from rocket launches and satellite reentries in Earth's upper atmosphere might reach treacherous tipping points if constellations of hundreds of thousands of orbiting data centers get deployed in the next decade, experts say.

There's no question that Earth has an AI data center problem. By 2030, AI data centers may be responsible for up to 17% of electricity consumption in the U.S., according to a forecast by the Electric Power Research Institute. New fossil fuel power plants are being built to feed the growing demand for electricity, and aging ones are kept online despite decarbonization plans. On top of that, huge amounts of water are taken from already strained reservoirs to cool the computers.

Companies such as SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin say they have a solution: moving the power-hungry data crunching infrastructure into space, where solar power is easy to produce, and heat can be radiated out into the frigid vacuum. Combined, those companies have filed applications to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to launch more than a million orbiting data centers in the next 10 years. Most of those will belong to SpaceX, if all goes to plan; Elon Musk has said the company wants to operate a million-satellite AI constellation all by itself.

The plans are making atmospheric scientists tear their hair out. If all these projects come to fruition, the number of satellites being launched to space and reentering the atmosphere will increase 100 times compared to today's numbers.

Moreover, the data center satellites will be much larger than the spacecraft orbiting Earth today. This large mass will translate into higher quantities of polluting propellant needed to loft these systems off Earth and a much larger amount of metals vaporizing in Earth's atmosphere during reentry. Neither is good news for our planet's air.

Pristine upper atmosphere

"Launches and the reentries are really the only things that humans do that deposit material directly into the upper atmosphere," Aaron Boley, an astronomy professor and space sustainability researcher at the University of British Columbia, told Space.com. "And the way things mix in the upper atmosphere means that the launch and reentry emissions are by far more impactful."

Most rockets emit black carbon, which could worsen global warming. Satellite bodies are mostly made of aluminum, which likely turns into aluminum oxide when burned in the presence of oxygen. Aluminum oxide is known for its ability to trigger ozone depletion, a hazardous process that was successfully thwarted by the Montreal Protocol of 1987.

Currently, scientists don't have a precise understanding of the chemical reactions that occur between the pollutants and the atmospheric gases at high altitudes. They also don't understand the tipping points, which may mean the difference between minor and major impacts on the climate. What is worse, pollutants in the upper atmosphere remain much longer than those emitted by cars and factory chimneys close to the ground.

"Close to the ground, we have rain and wind that removes pollution from the atmosphere within weeks," Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at University College London, told Space.com. "If we put it into the higher layers of the atmosphere, we rely on very slow atmospheric processes to bring this pollution back down."

Too many launches

Black carbon from rockets, for example, can stay in the atmosphere for three years, scientists think, meaning its concentrations could dangerously rise in the near future.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket is likely to play a key role in the deployment of data center constellations. Unlike SpaceX's current workhorse launcher Falcon 9, which burns a form of the aviation fuel kerosene, Starship combusts the much cleaner combination of methane and liquid oxygen. But Marais cautions that Starship's size and the much more frequent launches that will be needed to deploy the vast constellations would result in an overall increase in the pollution injected into the upper atmosphere.

"Starship is a bigger rocket burning more propellant," Marais said. "So, in terms of each rocket launch, the difference almost offsets. It has potential per launch to produce quite similar amounts of black carbon."

Andrew Wilson, a space sustainability researcher at Glasgow Caledonia University in the U.K., told Space.com that every single Starship launch produces around 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's about as much as 17,727 gasoline-powered passenger cars emit in a year.

And up to 77,000 Starship launches — some 15,300 per year — might be needed, according to estimates by Ars Technica, to deploy SpaceX's planned million-data-center constellation. That's a lot of rocket pollution added into the atmosphere. For comparison, there were just 324 orbital rocket liftoffs globally in 2025, according to Space News.

The space junk rain

Then there is the toxic ash from reentering satellites. Today, nearly 19,000 operational and defunct satellites orbit Earth, according to the European Space Agency. Currently, the most numerous type of satellite in Earth orbit is SpaceX's Starlink V2 Mini, each of which weighs about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms). But SpaceX's orbital data centers are likely to be much more massive. Featuring solar arrays 246 feet (75 m) wide, every data center satellite might weigh up to 7.5 metric tonnes, according to available estimates.

Industry insiders expect that SpaceX and other providers would want to replace their AI satellites every five years with newer technology, as they do with existing communications satellites. As a result, tens or even hundreds of tons of metal may be reentering the atmosphere every year in the future, exceeding the amount of natural space rock that hits the planet.

The materials that satellites are made of are not naturally present in Earth's atmosphere, which means the consequences of such reentries can be unpredictable.

"Only 10 years ago, the reentries were not really a concern, because there were much more natural meteorites entering the atmosphere per year," Wilson said. "But if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of satellites in space at any one time, you are essentially going to create a rain of man-made materials, electronic equipment and metals that otherwise wouldn't be coming into the atmosphere."

He added that the situation is akin to ongoing climate change, which shows no signs of slowing down as humanity has so far failed to reduce carbon emissions.

"This is the most objects we've ever had in space, and we're continuing to propose more and more and more and more and more," Wilson said. "And there seems, in my opinion, to be very little consideration for the environment."

Not enough funding is currently flowing into research to answer the unknowns, Marais added.

"We need way more observations and way more time to be able to look into that," she said.

Boley concurred: "We absolutely have to understand, and we have to understand that before we actually launch a million satellites. Not that we launch them and wait [to see] what happens."

The plans of the satellite companies are stirring protests also among astronomers, who fear that the light pollution the constellations create will impact astronomical observations. A recent study by the European Southern Observatory concluded that, if all currently planned satellite constellation projects were to be built, astronomical research from the surface of Earth would no longer be possible.

Rocket Lab plans to start launching even more frequently and flexibly, thanks to a new portable spaceport system called "GHOST."

GHOST — short for "Global Hypersonic & Orbital Spaceport Technology" — turns the company's "Electron and HASTE rockets into a launch-anywhere, launch-anytime capability for multi-launch flight campaigns and critical national security missions," Rocket Lab representatives said in a statement today (Aug. 10).

"Packaged entirely within standard shipping containers, GHOST deploys complete rockets, launch infrastructure, ground support and range control systems anywhere in the world," they added.

Electron is Rocket Lab's workhorse orbital rocket, giving small satellites dedicated rides to the final frontier. The expendable 59-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) launcher debuted with a test flight in 2017 and has 83 missions under its belt to date.

As its full name suggests, HASTE ("Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron") is a suborbital version of Electron that customers use to test various technologies in the hypersonic flight environment. HASTE first flew in June 2023 and has flown nine times to date, most recently in June of this year.

Rocket Lab currently flies from two different launch sites — one on the North Island of company founder and CEO Peter Beck's native New Zealand and one at Wallops Island in Virginia. But the company recently announced plans to fly out of Alaska's Pacific Spaceport Complex as well, and GHOST will expand its launch footprint even further.

"Electron and HASTE revolutionized small orbital launch and hypersonic testing. Now we're making it easier to deploy them wherever they're needed most, whether that's for missile defense testing or sovereign orbital launch capability," Beck said this afternoon during Rocket Lab's second-quarter 2026 earnings call.

"We've mastered the art of building launch sites," he added. "Now we're making them deployable worldwide."

Rocket Lab intends to deploy its two planned pads at the Pacific Spaceport Complex using GHOST, Beck said during the call. The company was inspired to develop the portable spaceport system, he added, to meet the needs of a HASTE customer, who expressed a desire for Rocket Lab to be "a little bit more mobile than we are."

Rocket Lab currently flies out of two pads at its New Zealand site and one at Wallops, though it has built a second pad at the Virginia facility to accommodate launches of its coming Neutron rocket.

Neutron will be bigger and more powerful than Electron, and partially reusable as well; its first stage is designed to come back to Earth for recovery and reflight, like SpaceX's Falcon 9.

Rocket Lab originally wanted to fly Neutron for the first time in 2024, but the new launcher has yet to leave the ground. Such delays aren't uncommon in the case of new rockets, and the company is making considerable progress with Neutron, according to Beck.

"Every part of the vehicle has now seen significant testing," he said during today's call. "As with any complex development program, we've had to tweak a few things along the way, but we're moving now into final checkout and assembly of all of our flight hardware before integrating them at the pad."

The company is on target to deliver the first Neutron to that Wallops pad in the fourth quarter of this year, Beck added.

China's latest rocket launch ended in failure this morning, lighting up the skies with some unwanted fireworks.

The state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) launched a Long March 7A rocket today (Aug. 10) from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, in the country's Hainan province, just after 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT; 8:02 p.m. local time). Around 85 seconds into the launch, the rocket exploded, generating a massive fireball and a cloud of smoke and debris while still soaring through Earth's atmosphere.

CASC had not yet released a statement about the incident by the time of this story's publication, but video reposted to social media captured the shock of onlookers the moment that the rocket burst into flames. Based on such views, the mission will almost certainly be deemed a complete failure, with total loss of vehicle and payload.

Today's launch was the 18th Long March 7A mission since the rocket's debut in 2020, which, subsequently, also ended with the vehicle's explosion. China traced that mishap to an engine malfunction that occurred shortly after first-stage separation. This morning's launch, however, didn't get that far.

The Long March 7A's four side boosters and core stage detach as a full cluster during first stage separation, which typically occurs just under three minutes after liftoff. As today's incident occurred just 85 seconds into flight, the rocket was still engaged in the main stage's initial engine burn to escape Earth's atmosphere.

The 7A — a variant of China's Long March 7 rocket family — stands just over 197 feet (60 meters) tall and combines the first two Long March 7 stages with a hydrolox (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen)-powered third stage capable of launching up to 7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

According to China National Radio, today's launch carried China's Zhongxing-4B spacecraft,, a communications satellite presumably bound for GTO. China's Zhongxing satellites provide telecommunications and broadband internet services and are also thought to provide services for China's military.

It is unclear what repercussions today's explosion may have on upcoming launches, including a Chinese Zhuque-3 rocket liftoff scheduled for Monday evening. That mission is scheduled to fly from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, more than 1,500 miles (2,415 kilometers) from Wenchang, at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT; 7:45 a.m. local time), and is expected to feature a first-stage landing attempt.

CASC uses the standard Long March 7 rocket, which shares its core stage with the 7A, as its launch vehicle for delivering cargo to the Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit about every eight months. The most recent of those missions launched in May, putting the next resupply launch sometime around January 2027. Depending on the cause of this morning's explosion, that mission and others could face delays as China investigates the incident.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:20 p.m. ET on Aug. 10 with new photos of the launch.

Japan's H3 rocket flew for the ninth time ever this afternoon (Aug. 10).

The H3 lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:23 p.m. EDT (1923 GMT; 4:23 a.m. on Aug. 11 local time), carrying the Michibiki 7 navigation satellite aloft.

The H3's upper stage deployed Michibiki 7 into its target orbit 29 minutes later, eliciting cheers from the folks in mission control.

The two-stage H3 is the successor to Japan's workhorse H-2A rocket, which retired last year after a total of 50 flights.

The H3 — which stands 187 feet or 207 feet (57 or 63 meters) tall, depending on what type of payload fairing it employs — debuted in March 2023 and had eight liftoffs under its belt before today.

Two of those eight were failures — the debut flight and the launch of Michibiki 5 in December of last year. But the H3 bounced back from that latter anomaly two months ago, successfully delivering six satellites to orbit on June 11.

Michibiki 7 will be part of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a homegrown navigation system that operates high above Earth in geosynchronous orbit.

"This system is compatible with GPS satellites and can be utilized with them in an integrated fashion," Japanese officials wrote in a description of the QZSS project. "QZSS can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well."

The QZSS network will eventually consist of 11 satellites, if all goes according to plan. There are five such spacecraft operating in orbit at the moment.

Michibiki 7 is carrying a payload for the United States as well — the Situational Awareness Camera Hosted Instrument (SÃCHI), which was developed for the U.S. Space Force by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the second of two SACHIs to go up on a QZSS satellite; Michibiki 6, which launched atop an H3 in February 2025, hosts the other one. (Yes, Michibiki 6 launched before Michibiki 5.)

"This program will allow the United States to monitor satellite behavior within the GEO belt over a very interesting part of the world," Mark Huber, a technical staff member in the Lincoln Laboratory's Space Systems and Technology Division, said in a statement in December 2020.

"It is also a pathfinder in several ways," he added. "The U.S. team is blueprinting methods to allow sensitive data sharing between the United States and Japan."

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3:55 p.m. ET on Aug. 10 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.

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.

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.

The Chinese commercial launch company Landspace is set for a second attempt at catching an orbital booster.

The startup launched its first Zhuque-3 rocket in December 2025, in what was a milestone for Chinese rocket reusability efforts. While the Zhuque-3 second stage successfully reached orbit, the first stage exploded in a dramatic fireball during its final powered descent toward the landing pad.

Now, Landspace is poised for a second attempt at liftoff and landing, with airspace closure notices indicating that launch is scheduled from the Dongfeng commercial space innovation pilot zone at Jiuquan spaceport, in northwest China, at around 7:45 p.m. EDT on Aug. 10 (23:45 GMT, or 7:45 a.m. Beijing time, Aug. 11).

The company conducted a successful static fire test on June 29 in preparation for the launch.

"All systems operated normally, and test data and results met expectations, validating the correctness and coordination of system operations and laying a solid foundation for upcoming flight missions," Landspace stated in a post that day on the social media platform X.

Zhuque-3 is a 216-foot (66-meter) stainless steel rocket powered by methane-liquid oxygen engines. It's similar in capabilities to SpaceX's Falcon 9, and is capable of sending 40,350 pounds (18,300 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Aug. 10 launch will be China's fourth orbital booster recovery attempt. The first was the Zhuque-3 launch in December 2025; the second was the debut, just days later, of the Long March 12A, which also reached orbit but with a first-stage recovery attempt ending in flames. The third try, using the Long March 10B, took place on July 10. That one was successful: China made history, becoming just the second country to land an orbital booster, in this case using a vessel equipped with a net-capture system.

Landspace, when it makes its expected second attempt next week, will use a powered descent and landing legs, similar to the Falcon 9.

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.

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.