A pair of private spacecraft just showed off some impressive maneuverability high above Earth.

The two probes — Mira satellites operated by the California startup Impulse Space — zoomed within 650 feet (200 meters) of each other in low Earth orbit (LEO) recently. The rendezvous demonstrated skills that could be useful to a variety of customers down the road, according to the company.

"These types of dynamic, agile maneuvers are how we unlock full access to space after launch and create new mission possibilities," Tom Mueller, CEO and founder of Impulse Space (and, prior to that, the first person Elon Musk ever hired at SpaceX), said in a statement on Tuesday (Sept. 8). "Our teams that design, build and operate Mira are leading the way toward a true space age, and customers across all sectors will be the beneficiaries."

Mira is an orbital transfer vehicle — a spacecraft designed to deliver customer payloads to precise locations in Earth orbit or beyond. The dishwasher-sized Mira can carry up to 660 pounds (300 kilograms) of gear and is highly maneuverable, as the recent rendezvous showed.

The operation involved Mira satellites that launched in January 2025 and November 2025, on missions that Impulse calls LEO Express 2 (LEO-2) and LEO Express 3 (LEO-3), respectively.

The action began this past February, when the LEO-2 Mira conducted a lengthy engine burn to close in on its counterpart. LEO-2 performed additional, smaller burns throughout the spring and summer, coming into orbital alignment with LEO-3.

"Then in July, LEO-2 executed a series of close approaches to LEO-3, starting at about 820 meters [2,690 feet] apart and subsequently moving closer to LEO-3," Impulse Space wrote in the Tuesday update. "Ultimately, for the closest approach, LEO-2 maneuvered to within about 200 meters of LEO-3."

Both Miras chronicled the rendezvous, snapping photos of each other with onboard camera gear. Two other companies, Starfish Space and HEO, worked with Impulse Space to pull off this orbital photo shoot.

Impulse has worked with Starfish before. The duo collaborated late last year on a rendezvous between LEO-2 and the first space-flown Mira, which launched on the Leo Express 1 mission in November 2023.

On that operation, called Remora, LEO 2 used Starfish Space navigation software to get within 4,100 feet (1,250 m) of LEO 1.

"We're showcasing some of the advanced capabilities that set Mira apart from other vehicles," Drew Damon, vice president of spacecraft programs at Impulse, said in Tuesday's statement. "Twice now, we've demonstrated that Mira has the agility and propulsion to support a new class of dynamic operations on orbit, and our team is excited to continue tackling the mission sets Mira is uniquely qualified to handle."

Impulse is not alone in developing and demonstrating orbital maneuverability. Such skills are a key priority of national governments, which want to service and upgrade their own satellites — and keep tabs on the activities of adversary craft. For example, earlier this year, two Russian spacecraft got within a mere 10 feet (3 m) of each other high above Earth.

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.

A team of researchers just chased a pair of reentering satellites in a private jet to learn about the pollution caused by space debris burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

The satellites in question were the European Space Agency's (ESA) Tango and Samba spacecraft, which once formed the Cluster constellation, together with the already de-orbited Rumba and Salsa. The quartet used to study the interaction of Earth's magnetic field with the solar wind. After 25 years of service, ESA took advantage of the Tango and Samba's controlled demise to help scientists learn what happens when satellites break apart and burn up during their spiral back to Earth.

The international team of researchers chased the two reentries, which occurred one day apart — on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 — above the southern Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles from the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga.

Their goal was to understand what happens when satellites disintegrate and what chemical compounds arise in the process. Although companies such as SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin want to launch huge numbers of satellites to space in the next decade — SpaceX alone plans to loft 100,000 of its Starlink V3 spacecraft — very little is known about the effects of satellite reentries on Earth's atmosphere. Researchers are also still unsure which spacecraft burn up completely and how many fragments may reach the ground, putting lives and property at risk.

"We want to understand what happens to these bodies as they fly through the atmosphere, which causes friction and very high temperatures," Jiří Šilha, CEO of the Slovak company Astros Solutions, and one of the researchers aboard the plane, told Space.com. "We know that those satellites break up into fragments, which subsequently melt in the atmosphere."

The researchers chased the reentering spacecraft following exact calculations provided by ESA controllers, who were able to maintain connection with the spacecraft until the very last moment before they plunged into the atmosphere.

The satellite reentries, although they occurred during daylight, were visible from aboard the plane even to the naked eye, said Šilha, and created spectacular fireballs that lasted tens of seconds.

"Bolides and meteors only last a few seconds or less," said Šilha. "But satellites are slower. They enter the atmosphere at a shallower angle, and the atmosphere slows them down further."

But the researchers were there for science, not for a sky show. And it was a rare opportunity: The Cluster trajectories were so precisely known that the scientists could prepare for them and be at the exact spot at the exact time to witness those explosions from only a couple of hundred miles away.

The aircraft, a small commercial business jet, was packed with 30 cameras and spectrometers fitted with special filters to capture not only how the satellites disintegrated but also detect the spectral signatures of the chemical elements released as their bodies burned up.

Eight scientists were squashed on board the darkened jet operating the instruments through the aircraft's six windows as the pilots navigated to the vicinity of the spot where ESA analysts had predicted the breakup would occur.

"We were flying toward the object, and first it looked like a compact source of light as the material ablated," said Šilha. "At some point, there was a sudden explosion as the satellite disintegrated."

The plane allowed the researchers to overcome any clouds that could obscure the view from the ground, and also to bypass the thickest layer of the atmosphere, which would distort the measurements. As the satellites hurtled through the air, slowing down from the mind-boggling speed of 22,370 mph (36,000 kph) at which they hit the upper atmosphere, the jet approached them to within a distance of around 75 miles (120 kilometers).

"We begin observing it when it's at about 90 kilometers [56 miles] and it stops being visible at about 65 to 70 kilometers [40 to 44 miles]," Šilha said. "For about thirty to forty seconds after the explosion, you can observe an interesting structure as all those various fragments ablate in the atmosphere. Then they all either burn up or slow down."

Šilha said the cameras captured tens of fragments, in detail that had never been observed before.

The researchers also attempted to trace seven chemical compounds, including titanium, sodium and potassium, which get released as satellites burn up. The team was especially interested in aluminum, which makes up the majority of a satellite body. Aluminum is not naturally present in Earth's atmosphere and most likely forms aluminum oxide during the incineration. The potential presence of aluminum oxide in the atmosphere in higher concentrations worries scientists, as it could potentially trigger ozone depletion in the stratosphere.

"We tried to measure the aluminum at different altitudes, using specialized filters, which could tell us when this aluminum interacts with the atmosphere," said Šilha. "That's when the aluminum oxide likely forms, and that's something that has never been observed before. We don't know exactly how and in what quantities the aluminum oxide might be forming."

The researchers will now analyze the data to learn exactly what chemical reactions may be occurring during every second of the breakup and burn-up process. The data will help atmospheric physics and chemistry researchers improve their models to further our understanding of the potential damage the growing satellite industry might do to the planet and its climate in the future.

"The data will help us validate whether the models agree with reality," said Šilha.

The team previously chased the reentry of the first of the four Cluster satellites — Salsa — in September 2024. The lessons from that campaign helped the team get closer to the Tango and Samba spacecraft and obtain more and more accurate data.

On Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket — then, after completing their job, the rocket's boosters safely landed back on Earth. Watching the events unfold, Space.com's Chelsea Gohd caught one of these beautiful landings on camera as onlookers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center watched in awe.

What is it?

The Roman Space Telescope is NASA's next great observatory, meant to revolutionize how we view the cosmos. Equipped with instruments like a coronagraph that can directly image exoplanets and a Wide-Field Instrument (WFI) that has a massively wide field of view, it's designed to work with big names like the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope and reveal our universe's intricacies on a grand scale.

But to get to space, like any other space telescope, it needed a rocket to ferry it there. In this case, that was SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. Falcon Heavy is about 230 feet (70 meters) tall and can lift nearly 141,000 pounds (64 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit. And importantly, Falcon Heavy's two boosters are reusable.

After launching a payload to space, the boosters split and each lands back on Earth in an upright position. In the image above, Gohd captured one of those boosters landing in the distance.

Why is it incredible?

Though we hear about it so often, there is something undeniably dreamlike about living in a time when a rocket can land its parts back on Earth so precisely. I was also there for the launch of the Roman Space Telescope in Florida, and it was breathtaking to watch such a huge piece of equipment navigate mid-air and straighten itself before landing. The crowd in the picture was equally astonished while the event unfolded.

My mother texted me just after she watched the Roman Space Telescope launch live online, exclaiming that the booster's landing looked just like a taxi returning to its station, getting ready for the next task. I hadn't thought about it that way before, but she was correct.

One of the boosters that participated in Roman's launch landed at Landing Zone 2 and the other hit the ground at Landing Zone 40. As NASA explained in a statement, one of these boosters carried out its very first mission while the other was on its third.

Now, the next spectacle to take our breath away will be Roman's very first images of the universe. Those are expected to drop next year.

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.

The Starlink missions keep on coming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

NASA's next big space telescope is not only meant to unlock some of the mysteries of dark energy. It also is a pioneer in the naming of missions.

Scientific American recently said that the observatory, which launched on Aug. 30, is the first ever space telescope ever named after a real-life woman: American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who supported development of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and was NASA's first head of astronomy in the 1960s.

The story is very different when it comes to men. For example, NASA's "Great Observatories," which launched between 1990 and 2003, were all named after famous U.S. male astronomers or physicists: the Hubble Space Telescope (Edwin Hubble), the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (Arthur Compton), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Lyman Spitzer).

Indeed, relatively few spacecraft of any kind have borne female names over the years — and most of the ones that did were not honoring actual, real-life people.

For instance, a number of missions with female names took them from mythology (e.g., NASA's Europa Clipper and China's Chang'e moon probes). Others used female names not attached to particular individuals (such as NASA's Clementine moon mission, and the European Space Agency's LISA, which is an acronym for "Laser Intraferometer Space Antenna.")

A notable exception is Sojourner, the mini-rover on NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander mission that was made famous again by the 2015 film "The Martian;" it's named after Sojourner Truth, a Civil War-era abolitionist. Sojourner's name was selected in 1995 from a worldwide naming contest for students and suggested by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Some other notable examples of missions honoring real-life women include:

• ESA's long-delayed ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, which is now set to launch to Mars in 2028. It's named after a British scientist who contributed to discovering the structure of DNA. (Part of the rover's mission is to analyze potential biosignatures on the Red Planet's surface.)
• The Cygnus International Space Station (ISS) resupply program, which is managed by Northrop Grumman. Multiple Cygnus freighters have been named after female NASA astronauts, including Janice E. Voss, Sally Ride and Kalpana Chawla, and one of them honored the American mathematician and "hidden figure" Katherine Johnson.
• Satellogic's ÑuSat/NewSat series. It has commonly named satellites after female historical figures in science, such as Black American chemist Alice Ball, Polish physicist-chemist Marie Curie and Australian radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott.
• Canada's GHGSat has a program in which employees name the company's Earth-orbiting satellites after family members, which has generated names from real-life people like Eleonore and Penny.
• The U.S. Space Force nicknamed its GPS III Space Vehicle-08 "Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson," another nod to the mathematician

What this means

Throughout history, the names of ocean-going ships — ships on the water, not spaceships — often have associations with women. The U.K.'s Imperial War Museums (IWM) suggests that women's names are used due to two traditions. The first is that, very generally speaking, the word "boat" is a "female" word in some languages that use gendered nouns, but that is by far not universal, even among the imperial sailing powers of the 1400s to 1600s.

The second association, which seems more likely, is the notion of a mother, goddess or similar "female figure" guiding a crew, which we see in theaters right now with "The Odyssey:" Athena helps Odysseus, reflecting the ancient Greek epic story. (For example, figureheads — sculptures on sailing ship prows — were often, although not always, carved in the likeness of women, Royal Museums Greenwich states.)

There are famous sailing ships with female names that many Americans can cite, such as the nicknames for the three Spanish ships — the Niña, Pinta and Santa María — used by Christopher Columbus during his famed first voyage to the New World in 1492.

"There's always been a tradition to name ships — and oftentimes after women," Valerie Neal, emerita curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's department of space history, told Space.com. Neal's research includes extensive work on female astronauts.

The U.S. space program has historically leaned upon mythological names of both genders for its missions, she noted, citing the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo human spaceflight programs as examples of male monikers. These days, Neal added, the education system is less tilted toward introducing children to old Greek or Roman myths, which may explain why it's now more common to name missions after real-life individuals.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, "there was a big debate at the time of the space shuttle naming whether to name the space shuttles after historic figures, or after concepts," Neal said. "One idea was even after Native American tribes." (For example, Tafuna High School in American Samoa recommended the name "Hōkūle'a" for shuttle, as noted in NASA's 1991 monograph "From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter-Naming Program")

The space shuttles were ultimately named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour after "historic ships of exploration," Neal said. You can read more about the origins of those names in this piece by The Space Foundation.

The Cygnus spacecraft "USS Janice Voss," which flew to the ISS in 2014, was the first U.S. orbital mission known to Neal to be named after a woman. "She had had an affiliation with the Orbital Sciences Corporation, and so they wanted to honor her," said Neal, referring to a previous company that managed the Cygnus program.

The flock of Cygnuses named after women — at least six of them, according to Neal — is "a good sign that people are starting to think of contemporary figures, or more contemporary, [and] naming spacecraft as a tribute to them, and to their contributions in science and exploration and discovery."

Naming a flagship space telescope after Nancy Grace Roman is another good sign, of course. And choosing her for this honor makes sense; she was in "a class by herself — because her name is so directly associated with astronomy and large space telescopes" like Hubble, Neal said.

"It is recognizing her significance in the history of space exploration as a leader who made so much possible, through her own work as an astronomer, but then as an administrator and manager at NASA made possible the orbiting solar observatories, the orbiting astronomical observatories — and then Hubble and the other great observatories that followed."

Roman's name on the telescope, she added, is "elevated" because "her name coincides exactly with the spacecraft and its purpose, whereas the names of the astronauts that are attached to the [ISS] resupply missions … not all of them had any connection to the International Space Station. Several did, but not all."

Neal said she's hopeful that more women will see their names attached to space missions, including both those historical astronomers who saw "their bosses were getting all the credit" as well as the numerous non-male scientists making impacts in the field today.

"I think it's entirely possible that, in time, there will be another major observatory named for a woman," Neal added. She noted that recommendations from the science community every 10 years form the basis of new space missions, and that the next such "decadal survey" in astrophysics is expected to wrap up around 2030.

In the nearer term, NASA is considering ideas such as an ultraviolet telescope, an advanced X-ray imaging satellite, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory for launch in the 2030s or early 2040s, presenting more opportunities to attach female names to flagship space missions.

Sidebar: Female mission names

With thousands of flown or planned missions to space, and numerous parts making up each spacecraft, it is difficult to compile a comprehensive list of probes or instruments that have had female names. The following is therefore a partial list, though an extensive one. In no particular order, it includes:

• Telescopes/observatories: NASA's Roman, ESA's Gaia, NASA's Pandora, the British-American Ariel V telescope, ESA's NewAthena, ESA's Ariel, ESA's LISA, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
• Human spacecraft: Mercury Aurora 7, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Grace.
• Satellites/ISS missions: ESRO-1A and 1B's nicknames of Aurora and Boreas, multiple Cygnus ISS resupply spacecraft, much of the Satellogic NuSat/NewSat constellation, several GHGSat spacecraft, Space Force's GPS III Space Vehicle-08 (nicknamed Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson), and the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite's multinational cosmic-ray module PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics).
• Moon: China's Chang'e series, the Soviet Union's Luna series, NASA's Artemis program and missions, Intuitive Machines' IM-2 lander Athena, JAXA's Selene/Kaguya, NASA's Clementine, the NASA ARTEMIS moon-orbiting probe.
• Venus: ESA's Venus Express, the Soviet Union's Venera series.
• Mars: ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover, NASA's Sojourner rover, JAXA's failed Nozomi orbiter.
• Jupiter/moons: NASA's Juno, NASA's Europa Clipper.
• Asteroids: NASA's Lucy, ESA's Hera.
• Other hardware: Some spacecraft/rocket parts have female names (e.g. the US military's Juno II rocket, Firefly Aerospace's Miranda engine, ESA's Europa and Ariane rockets).

The following at first glance appear to have female names, but either were not confirmed before this story's deadline or were confirmed to have other origins:

• Japan's MUSES Program (Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft), which may or may not reflect the English/Ancient Greek meaning of goddesses of knowledge.
• DoD's ALEXIS (the Array of Low Energy X-ray Imaging Sensors) and JAXA's Akatasuki (Venus Climate Orbiter) may not just reflect female names.
• NASA's Uhuru, which is not named after the female "Star Trek: The Original Series" character but after the Swahili term for "freedom."
• NASA's Dawn is meant to reflect the solar system's beginning, and not a person.
• The Soviet Vega series to Venus is meant to be VeGa, or as National Geographic once wrote, "a contraction of the Russian words for your dual targets, Venera and Gallei."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was torn.

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

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

I jumped in my car and headed to Hobby Lobby.

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

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

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

"Liftoff."

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

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

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

No guts, no glory.

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

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

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

A long journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Checking Roman out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A new era of astronomy is about to begin after NASA's newest flagship observatory leaped from the terrestrial bounds of Earth into the vastness of space this morning.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched today (Aug. 30) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center here in Florida. Liftoff occurred at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT) at Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A).

Roman is NASA's newest orbital observatory designed to add to the wealth of research and discoveries we've received from the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope. "The scope is extraordinary," Roman senior scientist Julie McEnery said during live commentary. "We will do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy and find 20 billion stars. That would make it the largest catalog of astronomical objects that's ever been produced."

While Hubble and the JWST are built to get close looks at distant phenomena in the universe, Roman will study the bigger picture of our cosmos. Its main instrument, known as the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), will take extremely wide images of the universe, capturing ultra-high definition views across broad swaths of the sky. It's also equipped with the first active coronagraph to be used in space, which will revolutionize exoplanet studies.

The Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, the first woman in an executive leadership role at the space agency. It was Roman who advocated for a telescope in space, leading to the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman, who died in 2018, earned the nickname "Mother of Hubble" as a result.

"It was Nancy in the old days, before the internet and before Google and email and all that stuff, who really helped to sell the Hubble Space Telescope, organize the astronomers, who eventually convinced Congress to fund it," Ed Weiler, Roman’s successor as Hubble's chief scientist, told the Voice of America in 2011.

At liftoff, Falcon Heavy blazed off the pad at LC-39A, roaring with the thunder of 27 Merlin 1D engines on the business end of the SpaceX triple-booster launch vehicle. About 2.5 minutes into flight, the rocket's two side boosters cut off their engines for a nominal separation and began trajectory burns to return for a landing back here on the Space Coast.

The rocket's core booster then continued onward to deliver Falcon Heavy's second stage equipped with Roman into space. Main engine cut off (MECO) and separation of Falcon Heavy's main stage took place about four minutes after liftoff, with fairing separation about 15 seconds later.

Falcon Heavy's side boosters, meanwhile, executed boostback burns for landings at SpaceX's Launch Complex-40 and Landing Zone-2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, a few miles downrange from LC-39A.

Roman's delivery to space caps more than a decade and $4 billion of development for the space telescope, which was made possible, in part, by incorporating elements of an unused spy satellite.

With its coronagraph and WFI, the telescope is designed to make groundbreaking strides in the fields of dark matter and dark energy, exoplanet discoveries, and will be capable of capturing views 100 times wider than those of its Hubble predecessor.

"The smallest Roman images will be a billion pixels," Dominic Benford, progam scientist for the Roman Space Telescope, said during live commentary. "When we take a billion-pixel image, there isn't a screen on Earth large enough to display all the pixels."

The coronagraph works by blocking out the light of distant stars in such a way that scientists can examine minute details around those stars — meaning they can map out exoplanets orbiting in the systems. Once active, Roman's Wide Field Instrument (WFI) will capture more than a terabyte of data daily; its largest survey will take over a year to complete and is expected to fill more than half a million 4K TVs.

How big will the largest Roman image be?

"A trillion pixels," Benford said.

You can actually adopt one of those Roman Space Telescope pixels yourself with NASA's new "Adopt a Pixel" program, which the agency announced during the Roman launch.

Roman's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle released the telescope to fly on its own a short 31 minutes after liftoff. NASA cheered the success, and even got a bit of a nod from celebrities in the form of a record message from singer Jewel.

"As you may know, I make artwork using astrophysical data, and there would be no data more fascinating than dark energy and dark matter," Jewel said in a recorded video. "And so, it is with this great wish of great success and Godspeed that I wish the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope so excited.

Now, the telescope is headed to sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), a relatively stationary orbital location beyond the orbit of the moon that allows the spacecraft to remain persistently on Earth's night side, with the sun on the opposite side of the planet. The locale places the sun to Roman's backside and points its sensitive instruments away from the intrusion of light reflected off the Earth and moon.

Roman's journey to L2 will take about 90 days. The first 40 or so of those days will be spent turning on the telescope's instruments and performing status checks as the spacecraft slowly configures itself for operation. Science commissioning will begin after about 45 days, its completion corresponding with when Roman arrives at L2.

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect that the most exciting science of Roman will be a surprise — something we couldn't predict and that will set the stage for the next, deeper set of questions for future missions to progress," McEnery told reporters a day before launch.

The telescope’s first images are expected in the beginning months of 2027.

Update for Aug. 30, 9 a.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched the Roman Space Telescope for NASA atop a Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). Read our full launch wrap story with video and photos.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A new flagship observatory is about to launch to space and join the ranks of its powerful predecessors, like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

NASA's groundbreaking new Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope is ready to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It's scheduled to depart from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bound for a gravitationally stable spot in space called Lagrange Point 2, or L2, nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth. The spacecraft's first window for launch is tomorrow (Aug 30) at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT).

Mission managers and launch administrators held a prelaunch briefing on Saturday (Aug. 29), confirming NASA and SpaceX's "go" to proceed toward tomorrow's lift off. Weather tomorrow currently poses a 50% chance of favorable launch conditions, according to launch weather officer Justin McReynolds of the Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron.

Roman's final L2 destination will place the spacecraft in a persistent position on the opposite side of Earth from the sun. "That means that we have a wide open view of the sky that really exceeds anything in low Earth orbit like Hubble could achieve," Jackie Townsend, Roman's project manager, said during the press conference.

Once in space and operational, Roman will begin completing wide surveys of the entire universe, taking thousands of images every day. The telescope will also allow for new research into dark matter and dark energy, and it will directly image exoplanets around distant stars.

"Nancy Grace Space Telescope will blow your mind. It is the size of a tour bus, and it weighs the same as a T-Rex," Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said during the press conference. "To put it into perspective, it will be as if Hubble and James Webb kind of peer through a keyhole at the universe, while Nancy Grace Roman will kick the door down."

Fox also put Roman's scientific potential in further context, saying its enormous datasets could help researchers tackle some of astronomy’s biggest questions. "Roman’s data will help bring us closer than ever to answering humanity's most profound questions,” Fox said, including whether "there are other solar systems like ours" and, ultimately, "are we alone in the universe?"

Before any of that science begins, however, Roman first has to get off the ground — and weather remains the biggest uncertainty for Sunday morning. McReynolds said forecasters are primarily watching offshore cumulus clouds, and the possibility of those producing showers or thunderstorms.

Conditions improve for the backup opportunities Monday and Tuesday, McReynolds said. The tropical disturbance influencing Sunday's forecast is expected to move west, dropping the probability of weather violating launch criteria to about 30% — offering a 70% chance of acceptable conditions.

Once in space, Roman will spend roughly three months going through instrument deployments, calibrations and checkout activities as it travels toward its operational orbit around L2. NASA expects the observatory's first science images to be released in early 2027.

SpaceX just took another step toward the highly anticipated next test flight of its Starship megarocket.

The company conducted an engine test with Starship's giant first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, on the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas on Friday (Aug. 28).

"Full duration 33-engine static fire with the Super Heavy booster preparing for Flight 14," SpaceX wrote in a Friday X post that shared two videos of the test.

As that post indicates, SpaceX is gearing up for the 14th test flight of Starship, a megarocket that consists of Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short.

The company has already vetted the engines on Flight 14's Ship, firing up all six of them last week at Starbase.

SpaceX is believed to be targeting mid-September for Flight 14, which will be a big milestone in Starship's development — the vehicle's first-ever orbital trip. Ship will also apparently deploy operational payloads into orbit on the flight — a batch of SpaceX's next-gen "Version 3" Starlink satellites.

Ship successfully deployed 20 V3 Starlinks on Flight 13 last month, but on a suborbital trajectory, and the satellites soon crashed back to Earth.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and both Super Heavy and Ship are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX therefore thinks the megarocket can revolutionize spaceflight, helping humanity expand its footprint out into the solar system.

NASA is invested in the vehicle as well. The agency chose Ship as a crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole in the coming years. If all goes to plan for SpaceX, Ship will fly on NASA's Artemis III mission to Earth orbit in mid-2027 and land astronauts on the moon on Artemis IV in late 2028. (NASA picked a second crewed Artemis lander, Blue Origin's Blue Moon, which could fly on one or both of those missions as well).

Update for Aug. 30, 9 a.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched the Roman Space Telescope for NASA atop a Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). Read our full launch wrap story with video and photos.

A huge SpaceX rocket is just minutes away from launching NASA's next great observatory into space: the Roman Space Telescope. But if you're hoping to watch it live online, you'll have to get up pretty early today (Aug. 30) or you'll miss it.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope, named after the late NASA astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, will launch on a mission to map the galaxy like never before. Liftoff is set for 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT) from a NASA pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. You can follow the mission in real time with our Roman Space Telescope live updates.

"Roman’s deep, sweeping surveys will help investigate dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize planets beyond our solar system, map billions of galaxies, study black holes and share enormous amounts of data with both scientists and the public," NASA said in an update Friday (Aug. 28), after clearing Roman for launch.

Here's a look at what time NASA's Roman Space Telescope will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, as well as how to watch online.

What time is SpaceX's Roman Space Telescope launch?

SpaceX is currently targeting the launch of NASA's Roman Space Telescope for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT) today, Aug. 30.

The company will launch Roman into space atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A launch livestream will begin about one hour before liftoff.

While SpaceX hopes to launch Roman on time, the company can try again tomorrow, on Monday, Aug. 31, if needed. A launch on that day would lift off a few minutes earlier, at 7:22 a.m. EDT (1122 GMT), SpaceX has said.

Can I watch SpaceX's Roman Space Telescope launch?

Yes, of course, you'll be able to watch SpaceX launch the Roman Space Telescope, and you have some options regarding where to tune in.

NASA will provide a launch webcast early Sunday morning. That livestream begins Aug. 30 at 6:20 a.m. EDT (1020 GMT) and will run through the launch and a post-launch briefing. That livestream can be found on the NASA website here, as well as all of NASA Social channels (Facebook, Instagram, X), and streaming channels like Twitch, Discovery+, Amazon Prime, NASA+, and of course YouTube.

Our Space.com livestream can be found on our VideoFromSpace YouTube channel, and will feature NASA's livestream simulcast.

SpaceX will also host its own launch livestream via its X account, which will begin about an hour before liftoff.

As mentioned above, SpaceX aims to launch Roman for NASA at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT), with the flight lasting about 31 minutes and 31 seconds — the time post-liftoff at which Roman is expected to deploy into space.

A post-launch press conference is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) and will include comments from the experts listed below.

• NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, NASA Goddard
• Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard
• Denton Gibson, launch director, NASA’s Launch Services Program, NASA Kennedy

How long is SpaceX's Roman Space Telescope launch?

SpaceX's Roman Space Telescope launch for NASA will last just over 31 minutes (31 minutes and 31 seconds, to be exact), in order to send Roman on its way into deep space.

After liftoff, the Falcon Heavy rocket's core booster and twin side boosters will fire for just under 2.5 minutes, after which the side boosters will separate and return to Earth. If all goes well, they should land about 7 minutes, 23 seconds after liftoff.

"This is the first and third flight for the two first stage side boosters supporting this mission, which previously launched the GOES-U and Viasat-3 F3 missions," SpaceX wrote in a mission overview. "Following stage separation, Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters will land on SpaceX’s Landing Zones 2 and 40 (LZ-2 and LZ-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida." SpaceX does not appear to be planning a core first-stage landing off shore for this flight.

Here's a look at the launch and flight timeline from SpaceX.

The upper stage of the Falcon Heavy will continue firing its engine through the 8-minutes-and-28-seconds mark, when it will shut down for a 16-minute cruise period. Just over 24 minutes into the flight, the second stage will reignite its single Merlin engine for about three minutes before shutting down for good.

The Roman Space Telescope will then deploy from its carrier at the 31:31 minute mark. It is expected to deploy its solar panels and sunshade shortly after liftoff, then spend the next few days unfolding its antenna and aperture cover, while also performing a mid-course correction burn on its way to its final destination: a stable point in space called Lagrange Point 2, about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, opposite the sun.

"The Roman team will complete a carefully orchestrated series of deployments, calibrations, and tests in the three months following launch before the observatory reaches its final orbit," NASA has said of the steps that will follow.

What if the Roman Space Telescope can't launch?

If SpaceX can't launch the Roman Space Telescope on Aug. 30, the company and NASA have at least one backup day to try again.

A second launch window is available on Monday, Aug. 31, at 7:22 a.m. EDT (1122 GMT), according to SpaceX. Both SpaceX and NASA are watching the weather closely to determine if Roman can fly on Aug. 30.

"Meteorologists with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 Weather Squadron are predicting a 60% chance of favorable weather conditions for launch, which is targeted for 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30 from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy," NASA wrote in an update Friday (Aug. 28).

Whichever day Roman launches, you'll be able to follow the mission live on Space.com. Be sure to return to Space.com on launch day for complete Roman Space Telescope launch coverage.

Update for Aug. 30, 9 a.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched the Roman Space Telescope for NASA atop a Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). Read our full launch wrap story with video and photos.

NASA's next great space observatory is about to lift off, and you can watch it live.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday (Aug. 30) at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 6:20 a.m. EDT (1020 GMT). You don't have to wait that long for a Roman fix, actually; there's stuff to watch on Saturday (Aug. 29) as well. Here's a rundown of this weekend's Roman action.

Saturday: Prelaunch briefings

Things kick off at on Saturday at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) with NASA's Roman Space Telescope mission science briefing. This should be quite eventful, for Roman's science goals are ambitious; it will likely discover thousands of exoplanets, for example, and reveal intriguing new information about mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

Participants are:

• Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters
• Julie McEnery, Roman telescope senior project scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Vanessa Bailey, Roman Coronagraph Instrument scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Kristen McQuinn, Roman Science Operations Center lead, Space Telescope Science Institute
• Lee Armus, Roman Science Support Center lead, Caltech/IPAC

Next up is the prelaunch press conference, which will discuss the mission's launch readiness. It will start at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT) and feature the following folks:

• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
• Lucas Paganini, Roman telescope program executive, NASA Headquarters
• Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, NASA Goddard
• Denton Gibson, launch director, NASA’s Launch Services Program, NASA Kennedy
• Julianna Scheiman, director, NASA Science and Dragon Programs, SpaceX
• Justin McReynolds, launch weather officer, 45th Weather Squadron, U.S. Space Force

Then, at 11:45 a.m. EDT (1545 GMT), NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, an accomplished pilot and private astronaut, will put on a mini air show of sorts.

Isaacman "is expected to fly past the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Falcon Heavy rocket on the launch pad in his jet," NASA wrote in an Aug. 24 media advisory. "The flyby will be shown live on the same stream as the prelaunch news conference, with a view of the launch pad during the transition. The flyby is subject to weather and operational considerations."

Sunday: Launch day

And there's more to watch on Sunday than the launch itself. At 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT), NASA will hold a post-launch briefing featuring Isaacman, Fox, Townsend, McEnery and Gibson.

They'll likely discuss the next steps for Roman, which include a 30-day journey to its deep-space home, the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2. This spot lies about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the direction of Mars. It's gravitationally stable, meaning Roman will be able to stay put without expending much fuel.

Mission team members will spend the next few months checking out the observatory's systems and science gear. It should be ready to begin its five-year science mission in early 2027.

More than a month after its epic spaceflight, Starship is finally headed home.

SpaceX announced today (Aug. 27) that it has loaded Starship's 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage — known as Starship, or simply Ship — onto a huge "semi-submersible" ship in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Christmas Island.

Ship had been in the water since July 24, when it splashed down to bring an end to the Starship program's 13th test flight. The vehicle will now head back to SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, a journey expected to take several months, according to the company.

Starship Flight 13 lifted off from Starbase, sending Ship on an hour-long suborbital jaunt that went quite well. The vehicle deployed its payloads — 20 of SpaceX's big, next-gen Starlink "Version 3" satellites — into space as planned and also managed to relight one of its six Raptor engines in the final frontier as well.

Ship then splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia — so softly, in fact, that it survived the ordeal intact. This was unprecedented; on every previous Starship flight, the upper stage had either broken apart during reentry to Earth's atmosphere or exploded shortly after splashdown, when it toppled sideways into the waves. (Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, attempted a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico during Flight 13 but suffered engine problems and hit the water hard.)

SpaceX determined to take advantage of this unexpected development. Getting an up-close look at Ship, the company said, would shed light on how its heat shield held up during the flight — key information that could advance the development of Starship, which is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

So the company began towing the Flight 13 Ship to shore — an endeavor that initially seemed doomed to failure.

"Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said in an Aug. 7 post on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022. He was responding to a SpaceX post that same day, which cited "challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas."

SpaceX persevered, however, and managed to tow Ship to Christmas Island, an Australian territory that lies about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) northwest of the city of Broome. Once there, company engineers inspected the vehicle for several days as it bobbed in the waves, gathering valuable data, according to SpaceX.

"They collected heatshield samples and gained vital insight into how the vehicle handled reentry with improvements now planned on future vehicles," SpaceX said today in an X post that shared several photos of the operation.

Further analysis doubtless awaits, after the semi-submersible hauler vessel — so called because its deck goes underwater beneath heavy floating payloads, then rises up with them on board — arrives in Texas.

"Congratulations to the entire SpaceX Recovery team for battling through challenging conditions to give our engineers access to a wealth of data to continue rapidly developing Starship," SpaceX wrote in another X post today.

SpaceX's launch from Florida early this morning (Aug. 25) was memorable in more ways than one.

The mission, which sent 29 Starlink internet satellites skyward from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:33 a.m. EDT (0933 GMT), was the 100th flight of 2026 for SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. It was also the 37th flight for this particular vehicle's first stage, setting a new reuse record for the company.

And we learned a few hours after liftoff that it was also the last-ever Falcon 9 Starlink mission to fly from the Sunshine State.

"From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on Starship. The West Coast team will continue regularly launching Starlink from Vandenberg [Space Force Base in California]," Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX vice president of launch, said via X this morning.

"In the last seven years, Falcon has flown ~260 Starlink missions from the Cape … can't wait until we launch that and many more with Starship!" he added.

Starship, which stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Starship remains in the testing phase; SpaceX has conducted 13 test flights with the vehicle to date, all of them suborbital.

Starship currently launches only from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. But the company is already building pads for the giant rocket in Florida, and it announced today that it plans to break ground next year on Starbase Louisiana, which it says will be able to support thousands of Starship liftoffs per year.

SpaceX thinks Starship will revolutionize spaceflight when it comes online. The company plans to phase out the Falcon 9 and its heavy-lift cousin, the Falcon Heavy, after that happens, so the final Falcon 9 Starlink launch from the West Coast may be coming relatively soon as well.

The Falcon 9 made quite an impression on skywatchers during this morning's Starlink swan song from the Space Coast, creating a "jellyfish" in the sky visible to folks as far away as New York City. Indeed, some people in the Big Apple posted video of the Falcon 9 cruising over the city's famous skyline.

The jellyfish effect is a regular feature of Falcon 9 missions that launch shortly before dawn or not long after dusk. During these windows, sunlight illuminates the rocket's expanding exhaust plume while the sky itself remains mostly dark.

The buildout of the Starlink megaconstellation has driven Falcon 9's launch cadence to record highs over the past few years. In 2024 and 2025, for example, the rocket lifted off a total of 297 times, and 211 of those were Starlink flights. Seventy-seven of the 100 Falcon 9 launches this year have been Starlink missions.

SpaceX launched 27 more of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit today (Aug. 26), in a predawn liftoff from California's central coast.

The spacecraft rode atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 5:35 a.m. EDT (0935 GMT; 2:35 a.m. local California time).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 24th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1082.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued powering its way skyward. It's scheduled to deploy the 27 satellites in low Earth orbit 62 minutes after launch.

There are already quite a few of them up there. The Starlink network — by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled — currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft.

The Falcon 9 has now flown 101 times so far in 2026, and 78 of those launches have been Starlink missions. The workhorse rocket is on pace to fly about 155 times this year — quite a number, but a bit shy of its record of 165, which was set in 2025.

Falcon 9 Starlink missions have historically flown out of both Vandenberg and Florida's Space Coast (from NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which are next door to each other). But Vandenberg will be the only Falcon 9 Starlink site from now on: SpaceX announced yesterday (Aug. 25) that it's pausing Florida Starlink launches until they can be performed by the company's Starship megarocket, which remains in development.

A new spaceport will bring 10 launch pads to Louisiana's Gulf Coast and support thousands of Starship launches per year.

SpaceX and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry announced Tuesday (Aug. 25) a $100 billion investment in the state's Vermilion Parish to build "Starbase Louisiana," a sprawling new manufacturing and launch facility for SpaceX's massive Starship rocket. It will be one of the biggest projects in the state's history, and serve as SpaceX's largest center for spaceflight operations.

Once complete, the new site will feature five complexes that feature two Starship towers each, for a total of 10 launch pads across the facility, each with its own propellant farm. That fuel will also be produced onsite as well.

"We're planning to build a self-sustaining spaceport with its own propellant production, power generation, deep water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and probably an airport," SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell said during the announcement event. "And thanks to the abundant resources here in Louisiana, we have ready access to the natural gas that fuels these rockets to get to orbit."

SpaceX and Louisiana officials say the site will eventually support thousands of launches per year and will be central to SpaceX’s effort to dramatically increase Starship’s flight rate. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk recently estimated that Starship will be launching more than 30 times per day by 2030, which equates to more than 10,000 flights per year.

Landry framed the project in historic terms, saying."This will be the place [from] which America reaches farther than it has ever reached before. In 1803, Louisiana gave America a continent. Today, Louisiana and SpaceX will give America the stars.”

Starship is SpaceX's next-generation, fully reusable launch vehicle. The giant rocket is still under development, but the company is quickly making strides to mature the rocket to operational status. SpaceX is preparing for Starship's 14th test flight in September, and is on a tight timeline to qualify the rocket for operational missions.

Shotwell said SpaceX's existing infrastructure can't support the number or cadence of Starship launches the company anticipates reaching, and tied Starbase Louisiana to SpaceX's long-term goal of using Starship to make human life interplanetary. In the nearer term, Starship is also tasked with returning astronauts to the surface of the moon.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of Starship for the agency's Artemis program. Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027, and will launch NASA's Orion spacecraft to Earth orbit to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with one of SpaceX's current "Version 3" Starship test vehicles. The first moon landing of the program is planned for Artemis IV in 2028, giving SpaceX a fast-approaching deadline to mature Starship from test article to crew-certified lunar lander.

For the Artemis IV Starship to carry out its mission of landing astronauts on the surface of the moon and then launching them back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Orion, and for any Starship mission beyond low Earth orbit, the spacecraft requires refueling launches of additional "tanker" Starships. Artemis IV's Starship may need up to a dozen such refueling flights. But Starbase Louisiana's 10 launch pads will be for more than propellant delivery.

SpaceX plans to launch its next-generation Starlink internet satellite constellation aboard Starship. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 300 Starlink missions aboard its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has delivered more than 11,000 of the satellites to orbit. Already preparing for the transition to Starship, SpaceX just launched its last Falcon 9 Starlink mission from Florida, and plans to fly the remaining Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. SpaceX intends to retire Falcon 9 entirely once Starship is fully operational.

The company is also planning for Starship to launch its huge artificial intelligence network and build out an orbital infrastructure to “move supercomputing to space,” Shotwell said, as artificial intelligence drives greater demand for resources.

“Put all of this together, and these tasks will require thousands of launches,” Shotwell said. “Starbase Louisiana is being designed from day one to support this dramatic increase in launch cadence.”

Construction on the new Starbase is expected to begin in 2027, with the first launch from the site targeted for 2029, SpaceX said. According to an outline of the plan from Louisiana Economic Development, the state agency overseeing the project’s economic development efforts, the project is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs over the next decade, and thousands of additional jobs indirectly tied to its development.

Already having gone through the processes in Texas and Florida, SpaceX has also already begun working with Louisiana wildlife and coastal agencies to assess the impacts of such a large industrial complex along the Gulf Coast.

"We are committed to doing our part to ensure that this land doesn't disappear," Shotwell said, viewing the area as a unique opportunity to fly the world's most powerful rocket, while supporting Louisiana's coastal resilience. "SpaceX is partnering with state and federal agencies to expand Louisiana's coastal master plan, including shoreline protection, marsh restoration, and wildlife conservation," she said.

Starbase Louisiana will be SpaceX's biggest undertaking ever, and likely the eventual hub of the company's launch operations. "This will be a project like no other," Shotwell said, "another piece of science fiction transported into reality."

The rumors are true. SpaceX plans to retire its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket once the company's giant next-generation Starship begins regular operational flights.

SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 for the first time in 2010, and the rocket soon chiselled itself a place in spaceflight history. The Falcon 9 has lifted off nearly 700 times to date, and it's the first orbital rocket ever to land and refly its first-stage booster. Russia's Soyuz rocket, which has been in operation since 1957, is the only launch vehicle with more missions under its belt, but the Falcon 9 is on track to pass it next year.

However, "winding down Falcon" — both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, a triple-booster variant that has flown 12 times to date — is inevitable, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said in an Aug. 22 post on X. "Once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift … production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day," he wrote.

The impact of Falcon 9's absence from the launch market can't yet be known, but industry reports suggest that SpaceX may discontinue all but a few Falcon 9 missions beginning in 2028. The ones that remain will likely include crew and resupply missions for NASA to the International Space Station (ISS), which is expected to continue flying until at least 2030, meaning that commercial operators will have to start looking to Starship to deliver their satellites to space.

When exactly SpaceX will begin to wind down Falcon 9 will depend on the continuing development of Starship. Unlike its predecessor, Starship is built for full reusability, with the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage both designed to return to Earth for recovery and reflight. (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy upper stages are expendable.)

And Starship is bigger than Falcon 9, too. The current Version 3 (V3) Starship stands 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, towering over the 230-foot tall (70 m) Falcon 9, and is capable of launching substantially heavier payloads to space. Starship is expected to be able to deliver more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). By comparison, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy can carry about 25 tons and 63 tons to LEO, respectively.

The majority of Falcon 9 missions over the past few years have been dedicated to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet network, with more than 300 launches since 2023 adding to the growing constellation of over 11,000 spacecraft. The more powerful next generation of Starlink satellites, however, are bigger, and designed to fit in Starship's payload bay, not atop the Falcon 9. And once Starship is launching reliably (and even before then), SpaceX plans to begin upgrading its Starlink network with the newer satellite version.

That will likely kick off an exponential upward trend for Starship launches. This happened with the Falcon 9, after all. SpaceX launched the rocket just 11 times in 2019, the year the company began assembling its Starlink constellation. In 2025, Falcon 9 flew a whopping 165 missions, and 122 of them were Starlink flights.

NASA has also contracted SpaceX to design a version of Starship for use as a lunar landing vehicle for the space agency's Artemis missions. A Starship V3 is in line to launch on the Artemis III mission next year, which will practice docking operability in LEO with NASA's Orion spacecraft. Starship has also been slated to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis IV in 2028. That's also when SpaceX has told NASA that it plans to end commercial Falcon 9 launches, according to Ars Technica.

One thing Starship has not yet been contracted or designed for is docking with the ISS. NASA is positioned to continue purchasing flights of SpaceX's cargo and Crew Dragon spacecraft to deliver astronauts and supplies to the space station through 2030, and would be hard pressed to shift those tasks to Starship. Cost and contract logistics aside, the mere size of Starship poses significant engineering risks outside the station's safety margins.

Regardless of the timeline for the ISS, SpaceX's planned sundowning of Falcon 9 also hinges on Starship's success. The launch vehicle has flown 13 suborbital test flights to date. Another is poised to lift off within the next month, and may be the rocket's first attempt at fully reaching orbit. But that's just one of many milestones that Starship must hit before it can begin "flying reliably several times per week," as Musk stipulated in his post.

That kind of turnaround time has already been achieved by Falcon 9, but building up Starship's infrastructure is a much bigger enterprise than the dozen or so successful test flights the vehicle has under its belt. And how quickly SpaceX can scale Starship to match Falcon 9's reliability will ultimately determine how soon the legacy rocket is largely phased out of commission.

Starlink launches may have become commonplace, but this one was definitely worth staying up for.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped with 29 Starlink internet satellites lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday (Aug. 25), at 5:33 a.m. EDT (0933 GMT).

It was the 100th Falcon 9 flight of 2026 and the record-breaking 37th mission for this rocket's first stage, a booster designated B1067.

The Falcon 9 is by far the busiest rocket in operation today. Last year, it flew 165 missions — more than all of the world's other orbital rockets combined. And all 165 of those flights were fully successful.

Extensive first-stage reuse is the Falcon 9's secret sauce, making it cheaper and more efficient to fly than its competitors. Those competitors are racing to catch up, however, and some are making strides. In the past six weeks, for example, two different Chinese rockets aced landings during orbital missions.

But neither one of those newcomers has made it back to the pad for a second flight. SpaceX, meanwhile, has six Falcon 9 boosters with at least 30 flights under their belts, led by B1067's 36. (The others are B1077 and B1078 with 30, B1069 with 32, B1063 with 34 and B1071 with 35).

And SpaceX plans to take reuse to even higher levels. The company's next-gen megarocket, Starship, is designed to be completely and rapidly reusable, with each vehicle capable of flying multiple times per day, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. (The Falcon 9 and its cousin the Falcon Heavy are only partially reusable; they have expendable upper stages.)

After launch, B1067 returned to Earth for recovery and yet more reuse. About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, the booster landed on the drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas," which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued on to deliver its 29 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, deploying them there 61.5 minutes after launch.

Tuesday's liftoff was the 77th of 2026 devoted to building out Starlink, by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled. It currently consists of more than 11,000 operational spacecraft, and that number is growing all the time.

The Falcon 9 isn't the only SpaceX rocket to have flown this year. The company has also launched one Falcon Heavy mission and two suborbital Starship test flights. Starship will try to go orbital for the first time on its next liftoff, which is expected in early to mid-September.

SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink internet satellites this morning (Aug. 22) on a milestone mission for the company's Falcon rocket family.

A Falcon 9 carrying 27 Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California today at 3:25 a.m. EDT (0725 GMT; 12:25 a.m. local California time).

It was the 99th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, and the 100th Falcon mission of 2026 overall. The other flight was performed by a Falcon Heavy, which lofted the telecom satellite Viasat-3 F3 in April.

Hitting the century mark at this point in the year is impressive. But SpaceX has a ways to go to equal its single-year Falcon launch record of 165, which was set in 2025. All of those were Falcon 9 missions.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth today as planned. It touched down about 8.5 minutes after launch in the Pacific Ocean, atop the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the ninth flight for this particular booster, which carries the designation B1100.

The 27 Starlink satellites, meanwhile, kept traveling to low Earth orbit aboard the Falcon 9's upper stage, deploying on schedule just under 62 minutes after launch.

Today's launch makes the largest-ever satellite constellation even bigger: Starlink already consists of more than 11,000 operational spacecraft.

As you might expect, Starlink satellites are SpaceX's most common payload; 76 of this year's 99 Falcon 9 flights have been dedicated Starlink missions.

And the number of SpaceX satellites is expected to rise considerably in the coming years. The company has said it wants to launch 100,000 of its next-gen Starlink V3 satellites and operate a constellation of one million data centers in Earth orbit. These spacecraft will fly atop SpaceX's Starship megarocket, which remains in development.

SpaceX is picking up the pace of preparations for the next launch of its giant Starship rocket.

On Wednesday night (Aug. 19), the company completed a single-engine static fire test with its Ship 41 vehicle, the upper stage that's in line to fly Starship's upcoming Flight 14 mission. As its name suggests, Flight 14 will be Starship's 14th test flight, but it will be the rocket's first launch into orbit, if all goes according to plan.

The recent engine burn was designed to prepare for that jaunt. "Starship completed a single engine static fire demonstrating a deorbit burn for upcoming orbital missions," SpaceX wrote in an X post on Thursday (Aug. 20).

Video included in the post shows Ship 41 standing at SpaceX's Massey's test site, near the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. The clip shows the moment of ignition of one of the spacecraft's six Raptor 3 engines, which burns for approximately 15 seconds.

SpaceX followed up Wednesday night's test with a full six-engine test on Thursday (Aug. 20). That burn lasted approximately 60 seconds, as seen in video posted by the company the next day.

With the completion of Ship 41's first static fires, SpaceX could be on track to launch Flight 14 sometime in early to mid-September. However, there are still a number of prelaunch activities for the ship and its Super Heavy first-stage booster to clear before SpaceX will declare them launch ready, and, with Flight 14 tasked with placing Starship in orbit for the first time, the company is likely to be extra cautious.

Flight 14 will be Starship's third launch of 2026, and the third to feature the upgraded "Version 3" (V3) of the vehicle, which SpaceX introduced in May. SpaceX is also modifying a Starship V3 to dock with NASA's Orion spacecraft as a part of the Artemis III mission to Earth orbit next year.

NASA contracted SpaceX as one of two commercial moon lander providers for the Artemis program. The agency plans to land astronauts on the surface of the moon aboard a Starship lunar landing vehicle on the Artemis IV mission in late 2028.

SpaceX had apparently originally intended to attempt a return-to-launch-site recovery for Ship 41, but company founder and CEO Elon Musk recently said that milestone will now likely happen "in a few months."

Ship 41 will instead likely attempt a soft ocean splashdown at the end of its flight, and its Super Heavy counterpart, Booster 21, is expected to do the same. SpaceX has returned three of its Super Heavy boosters to Starbase for successful catches using chopstick-like arms on the rocket's "Mechazilla" launch tower, and it has managed to refly two of those. But a V3 Super Heavy catch has not yet been attempted.

Returning and reflying both Starship stages is a key component in SpaceX's design for the giant rocket, which will be the largest, most powerful launch vehicle in history once the company works out all its kinks. If it can, Musk said on a recent earnings call that he expects the rocket to launch "at least one flight a day, possibly more." In an Aug. 20 X post, Musk said SpaceX aims to support 30 Starship launches per day, or more.

SpaceX launched yet another Starlink mission today (Aug. 21), sending 29 more of the broadband satellites to orbit from Florida's Space Coast.

The spacecraft flew aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 11:14 a.m. EDT (1514 GMT). That was a day later than planned; SpaceX scrubbed a liftoff attempt on Thursday (Aug. 20) for reasons that were not immediately clear.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned today, landing about 8.5 minutes after launch in the Atlantic Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was the 30th liftoff and touchdown for this particular booster, which is designated B1078.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the Starlink satellites skyward. It will deploy the new batch into low Earth orbit 61.5 minutes after liftoff, if all goes to plan.

There are already quite a few operational Starlink spacecraft up there —nearly 11,000, in fact, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

Today's launch was the 98th Falcon 9 flight of the year already. Seventy-five of them have been dedicated Starlink missions.

SpaceX also has three other liftoffs under its belt in 2026 — one launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket and two test flights of its Starship megarocket, which is still in development.

We'll have to wait a bit longer for a highly anticipated Starship milestone, it appears.

On Aug. 4, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company aimed to attempt the first-ever catch of Starship's upper stage on the vehicle's next test flight, which is tentatively targeted for late August.

But that doesn't seem to be in the cards anymore. "Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months," Musk said early this morning (Aug. 20) via X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.

SpaceX has high hopes for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Rapid reuse will be enabled by landings directly on the launch mount, with the aid of the launch tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX has already pulled off such chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of Starship's 13 suborbital test flights to date. And two of those missions featured a used Super Heavy: Flight 9 used the same booster as Flight 7, and Flight 11 employed the one from Flight 8.

SpaceX has not yet tried to catch Ship, however, because it's a tougher ask: The upper stage comes back down to Earth from much greater heights, and at much higher speeds, than Super Heavy.

But the company has made progress toward this goal recently. For example, on Flight 13, which launched on July 24, Ship survived reentry through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in its target zone, a patch of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The vehicle even remained intact after toppling over, a feat none of its predecessors had pulled off. SpaceX subsequently towed Ship to Christmas Island and will study it in depth to inform future iterations of the vehicle.

This encouraging performance led to optimism about a coming tower-catch try for Ship.

"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 on Aug. 4, during SpaceX's first call with investors as a public company.

As that quote indicates, however, a Ship tower catch is not entirely up to SpaceX. It also requires approval from regulators — specifically, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. It's possible that such approval has not yet been secured for Flight 14, and that's why the timeline has shifted.

After all, Musk has continued to voice confidence in Ship's abilities.

"If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught," he added in this morning's X post. "First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars."

Even without a Ship catch attempt, Flight 14 should still feature some exciting action. During the earnings call, Musk said that Starship will go orbital on Flight 14, something it has never done before.

NASA's veteran moon-circling spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has imaged the impact site of that errant Falcon 9 upper stage.

The photos were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, just a few days after the SpaceX rocket body slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater at 5,400 mph (8,690 kph).

LRO's high-resolution camera system, known as LROC, got good views of the aftermath from a variety of angles, snapping away every 117 minutes, the time it takes the orbiter to circuit the moon.

Diameter and depth

According to LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, who's based at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, the newly formed impact crater is about 60 feet (18 meters) wide and appears to be less than 10 feet (3 m) deep.

"The distinctive V-shaped ejecta pattern on the south side of the crater is consistent with natural impactors hitting the moon at low angles relative to the surface," said Robinson.

The sixth (and final) image in LROC's sequence of the new crater, he added, was acquired with the largest slew angle (68 degrees), presenting a view similar to what an Artemis astronaut would see looking out his or her Orion spacecraft window toward the lunar horizon.

Telling tilts

To capture imagery of the impact site, LRO operators tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the target region each time the spacecraft passed about 60 miles (97 km) above the moon. In doing so, researchers could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed impact features.

According to NASA, the LRO imagery shows bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater.

"The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision," with the brighter streaks near the crater rim formed by "fresh material excavated from deeper underground," NASA officials said in an Aug. 18 statement.

Korea's lunar orbiter

The site of the Aug. 5 crash was imaged earlier by the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, also known as Danuri. That mission team used Danuri's high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager to spot the new crater. After capturing images of the impact zone, the Danuri mission sent updated crater coordinates to the LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence, NASA officials said.

Wandering through space for over a year and a half, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent two robotic landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace — toward the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Blue Ghost succeeded in its lunar touchdown, but Resilience crashed during its attempt.

The seas have been kind, or at least kinder than expected, to SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, as it's been tugged through the Indian Ocean to friendlier tides.

Ship 40, the upper stage that flew on Starship's Flight 13 test launch, performed the vehicle's first successful intact ocean splashdown at the end of its mission on July 24, after lifting off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas. The spacecraft landed in the Indian Ocean as planned and has since become the focus of the SpaceX Recovery team, tasked with hauling it to port.

Over the past 24 days, that team faced "challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas," SpaceX said in an Aug. 7 post on X, and at one point was not expected to be successful in its efforts to haul Ship 40 safely to shore. Despite the odds, however, they have now reached calmer waters. The massive, 171-foot-tall (52 meters) spacecraft now floats just offshore of Christmas Island, awaiting inspection. "A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase," the company said in an Aug. 18 update.

Christmas Island is an Australian territory about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) northwest of Broome. Most of the island is a national park, and it's famous for its 40 million or so red land crabs, which migrate en masse to the sea to spawn in one of the world's great wildlife spectacles.

Flight 13 was the second launch for the Version 3 (V3) design of SpaceX's towering Starship rocket. V3's debut on Flight 12 in May didn't quite go as planned — engine issues after stage separation caused the vehicle's Super Heavy booster to crash into the Gulf of Mexico instead of splashing down softly as intended. Ship 39 executed its landing burn above the Indian Ocean just like Ship 40 did, but Ship 39 exploded after toppling into the water — the expected outcome for Ship during Starship test flights. Ship 40 was the first one to survive the splashdown intact.

The fact that Ship 40 didn't explode has given SpaceX the unexpected opportunity to study the spacecraft up close. The company's iterative design process has led to the introduction of incremental improvements for each progressive Starship launch. Ship 40 is the first upper stage that has flown in space and returned in one piece, and it therefore provides a previously unstudied article for evaluation as SpaceX works to perfect the spacecraft's aerodynamics, hydraulics, heat tile efficiency and overall design.

Starship is SpaceX's super heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to be the world's most powerful rocket, and the first capable of full reusability. Starship's expected readiness for operational missions has been a shifting goalpost since its first test launch in April 2023, and there are still some big milestones that SpaceX needs to reach in order to avoid rippling delays through other parts of the space industry.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to build a version of Starship to land astronauts on the moon as a part of the Artemis IV mission in 2028, and to fly a compatible V3 Starship to practice rendezvous and docking maneuvers with the Orion spacecraft in Earth orbit on Artemis III next year. Starship still has several boxes to check on NASA's qualifications list before it will be certified to fly astronauts, and a significant one of the those, reaching orbit, may be just on the horizon.

SpaceX is already preparing Ship 41 and its Super Heavy booster for Flight 14. During that flight, the company plans to not only deliver the upper stage to orbit but also to return Ship to Starbase for recovery using the "Mechazilla" launch tower's chopstick arms — a major step toward Starship's full reuse capability. SpaceX hopes to launch Flight 14 before the end of August, CEO Elon Musk said during the company's first earnings call earlier this month.

SpaceX has hit the century mark for the third year in a row.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Wednesday (Aug. 19) at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT; 9:01 p.m. on Aug. 18 local time).

It was the 97th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 100th mission of 2026 overall for SpaceX.

The mission is carrying 24 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit. If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9's upper stage will deploy them there 61.5 minutes after liftoff.

The rocket's first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes into flight as planned, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 12th mission for this particular booster, which is designated B1097.

B1097 is no stranger to milestone flights. During a Starlink launch this past April, for example, the booster performed the 600th landing of an orbital rocket in SpaceX's illustrious history.

The vast majority of SpaceX's launches this year — at the moment, 74 of them — have been devoted to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 11,000 operational satellites.

One of SpaceX's three non-Falcon 9 launches of 2026 was performed by its Falcon Heavy rocket. The other two were suborbital test flights of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.

SpaceX first topped 100 launches in 2024, when it conducted a total of 138 missions (132 by Falcon 9, two by Falcon Heavy and four by Starship). In 2025, the company flew a total of 170 times (165 by Falcon 9 and five by Starship).

Such numbers will jump dramatically in the coming years, if all goes to plan. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company wants to launch Starship multiple times per day, boosting annual tallies to 1,000 or so. Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy aren't part of this longer-term picture; SpaceX wants to phase them out and have Starship shoulder the load.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:20 a.m. ET on Aug. 19 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

SpaceX keeps setting spaceflight records.

Elon Musk's company launches far more frequently than any other outfit, and it operates the largest satellite constellation ever assembled — the Starlink broadband network, which consists of nearly 11,000 satellites (and counting).

On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart, besting its old mark — set on Aug. 31, 2024 with two Starlink missions — by 27 minutes.

The first liftoff, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, occurred Saturday at 9:12 p.m. EDT (0112 GMT on Aug. 16) and carried eight satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for Louisiana-based telecom company Globalstar.

All eight spacecraft were deployed successfully, separating over a six-minute span beginning 56.5 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced via social media.

While that Falcon 9 was powering its way to LEO, another one launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on California's central coast. That liftoff, at 9:50 p.m. EDT (6:50 p.m. local time; 0150 GMT on Aug. 16), kicked off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called USSF-366.

We know very little about USSF-366, which isn't surprising given its classified status. However, rocket watchers have made a few inferences from the limited available information.

"It is possibly a batch of classified LEO 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," NextSpaceflight.com wrote in its mission description. (Starshield is a SpaceX project that uses modified versions of Starlink craft to fly national security missions for the U.S. government.)

It's unclear when and where the rocket's upper stage will deploy the USSF-366 payload(s); SpaceX's mission description doesn't reveal that information. And the company ended its livestream shortly after the first-stage landing, as is typical for national security flights.

Both of Saturday's missions featured successful rocket landings. The Falcon 9 first stage that launched the Globalstar mission came back for a touchdown at Cape Canaveral about eight minutes after launch. It was the 14th flight for that particular booster.

The USSF-366 Falcon 9 first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after its launch, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." That booster now has 18 missions under its belt.

Saturday's doubleheader brought the tally of Falcon 9 launches in 2026 to 96. The vast majority of those — about 75% — have been Starlink missions.

Cards Against Humanity isn't done with its scorched-Earth campaign against SpaceX and Elon Musk.

The Chicago-based company behind the popular fill-in-the-blank adult card game is inviting the public to join its design committee to erect an "Elon Musk is a Sad Little B----- with No Friends" monument on a stretch of land it owns near SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility in South Texas.

Cards Against Humanity (CAH) brought a $15 million lawsuit against SpaceX in 2024 for illegally dumping construction materials and other equipment on land owned by CAH. SpaceX decided to settle with the company in 2025 and removed its "gravel, tractors, and space garbage" from the property prior to the area's annexation for the city of Starbase's incorporation, according to CAH. But the company, and its apparent distaste for "racist billionaires," as it has labeled Musk, as well as President Trump, is still pushing back.

Trump's role in the ordeal informs why CAH owns the Texas property in the first place. The company launched the "Cards Against Humanity Saves America" campaign during Trump's first term in 2017, which included an effort to throw a roadblock in the U.S. government's ability to complete construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The campaign attracted 150,000 contributors who paid $15 each, enabling CAH to purchase the land and retain the services of an eminent domain law firm "to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall."

SpaceX had already purchased much of the surrounding land by then and officially broke ground at what would become Starbase in 2014. Starbase is the center of development and operations for SpaceX's Starship rocket — a fully reusable launch vehicle that will clock in as the world's largest, most powerful rocket in history once it's operational.

Major construction at Starbase began in earnest in 2018, with the first Starship prototype vehicle tests beginning in 2019. When CAH filed its lawsuit against SpaceX in 2024, SpaceX had already managed to launch four full-stack Starship test flights and begun construction of a second Starbase launch pad. That's around when the facility's general expansion began to encroach on CAH's property, according to a complaint the company filed in Texas' Cameron County 404th District Court.

Starbase's location at the very southern tip of Texas provides a safe and remote area for testing giant rockets. But SpaceX's increased activity there has triggered a large influx of employees in search of housing in and around the unincorporated Boca Chica area, which had been sparsely populated. SpaceX eventually began constructing clusters of homes for its employees around its facilities, and, in an effort to obtain some control over local governance for things like zoning and permitting, workers and residents voted to incorporate Starbase as its own city in May 2025.

That CAH's plot of land was annexed as part of Starbase's official incorporation has apparently not sat well with the people behind the popular card game, and they are once again engaging the public to try to get Musk's attention. In a Threads post on Aug. 13, the company asked, "Who wants to f---- with Elon Musk?"

"Now, our parcel has been annexed into a 'town' called 'Starbase' — a corporate hellscape littered with broken rockets and ugly mansions for Musk's executives," the post says. In typically colorful CAH fashion, it adds, "But hope is not lost! We still have our rights as proud Texas landowners: We can build something on our land. Something that will annoy Elon Musk. A grand monument to make him wonder, for a brief moment, 'Wait, am I a sad little b---- with no friends?'"

The announcement calls for the formation of a design committee for the aforementioned monument, which CAH describes as "a movement of like-minded people working together … to force a moment of introspection" for Musk, available for anyone to join for $10 at "ElonHasNoFriends.com". The post also advertises that 10% of profits from sales of its new game expansion decks will go toward funding the monument as well.

CAH isn't alone in criticizing Musk and SpaceX's Starbase activities. Musk's public persona has grown exponentially with SpaceX's successes over the past decade or so and his 2022 purchase of the social media platform Twitter, which he renamed X. Musk has also drawn criticism for his comments and actions during the 2024 election, which he may have helped swing via the donation of nearly $300 million to Trump and other Republican candidates. As early as 2022, a group of anonymous SpaceX employees posted an open letter to executives on an internal company forum saying, "Elon's behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment."

Others, however, praise Musk for the inarguable contribution of reusable rockets that SpaceX introduced with the Falcon 9, and his aspiration to make humanity a multi-planetary species. He was also named Time Magazine's person of the year in 2021, and SpaceX has become an indispensable asset to NASA and U.S. spaceflight. The company's Crew Dragon capsule is currently the only American-launched spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station, and NASA has contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of Starship to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis IV in 2028.

SpaceX's activities at Starbase have received scrutiny as well. When the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) conducted its environmental assessment of Starbase to approve Starship launches from the site in 2021, more than 18,000 comments were submitted by members of the public, delaying the report's publication for nearly half a year as each one was reviewed. When the FAA did publish its assessment, SpaceX was cleared for Starship launches out of Starbase, pending nearly 80 actions needed to ensure its reduced environmental impact on the area, which SpaceX soon addressed.

To date, SpaceX has launched 13 Starship test flights with varying degrees of success. Some have resulted in the awesome return and catch of the rocket's Super Heavy booster using the "Mechazilla" chopstick arms on the Starbase launch tower, others featured Starship debris raining down within view of populated areas like The Bahamas, and at least a couple launches ended with a combination of both those outcomes.

The very public display of exploding rockets from SpaceX over the last several years has raised more than a few eyebrows of people wondering about the repercussions of where that potential aerospace carnage might come crashing down. But those results are also indicative of SpaceX's iterative "test like you fly" philosophy for vehicle development.

Musk sees Starship as humanity's ticket to extending our species' footprint to the moon, Mars and beyond, and is often quoted saying, about Starship and other subject matter, that "we live on the most interesting timeline." If Starship lives up to Musk and SpaceX's promises, it stands to create another monumental, industry-changing impact on spaceflight history, with the potential to launch our civilization into the cosmos. And, if it has to lift off within sight of a monument calling SpaceX's CEO "a sad little b---- with no friends," that would be pretty interesting indeed.

An 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) Falcon 9 rocket stage hit the moon last Wednesday (Aug. 5), stirring lunar regolith in a massive plume of dust observable all the way from Earth.

The rocket joined some 3,000 manmade objects scattered on the surface of our planet's companion. Some experts think it's about time we start treating the pristine lunar environment with a bit more respect.

Around 200 tons of Earth stuff have been either deliberately left on or crashed into the moon since the beginning of the space age. Some of this material has a prominent place in history books: The descent modules from all six Apollo landing missions, Soviet Lunakhod rovers from the 1970s and China's 2010s Yutu 1 and 2 robots still sit where they had been left or ran out of power.

But there is also a lot of stuff on the moon that wasn't really meant to end up there. Astronomer and space historian Jonathan McDowell says that many rocket stages and other objects left in orbit between Earth and the moon since the first lunar missions in the 1960s may have ended up on the gray dirt. Four years before the Falcon 9 upper stage crashed near Einstein Crater, for example, part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket slammed into the moon's far side. And experts think such incidents could become increasingly common in the coming years, as exploration of the moon intensifies.

"We're in a transitional moment," McDowell told Space.com. "From the era when there was rare lunar exploration mostly by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we've seen over the past decade other nations landing on the moon and the beginning of commercial missions. But governance has not kept up with this. We don't have an international set of agreements on how to operate near the moon, how to coordinate activities near the moon, and we're really going to need it because, not only is the amount of activity at the moon increasing, but the number of different players is greatly increasing, too."

Human activities on the moon are governed by the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty, Marieta Valdivia Lefort, a policy officer at the Royal Astronomical Society in the U.K., told Space.com. Article IX of that treaty binds countries to "conduct the exploration of outer space in a way that avoids harmful contamination," she said. But what exactly constitutes such contamination is unclear, she added.

"There are international legal frameworks that apply to activities on the moon and include obligations concerning harmful contamination, but there is no dedicated international 'waste law' or comprehensive 'rubbish-management' system for it," Lefort wrote in an email. "The Outer Space Treaty does not define when contamination becomes 'harmful.' It does not set numerical waste limits, create approved disposal sites or require every object on the moon to be removed."

The moon is big. Its surface area, around 14.7 million square miles (38 million square kilometers) rivals that of Asia, Earth's largest continent, which covers 17 million square miles (44 million square km). But the moon's low gravity — around 17% that of Earth — means the dust that an impact stirs up travels a long way and takes a long time to settle, McDowell said.

"It's not just a local event," he said. "It's an equivalent to a continental-level event. In the future, when you have permanent human bases and scientific experiments on the moon, you don't want rocket stages smashing into the moon on a regular basis, creating big plumes of dust that could contaminate instruments or disturb gravitational wave detectors."

Moreover, the artificial material introduced and the craters that arise when heavy rocket stages smash into the lunar surface are altering the lunar environment, potentially erasing yet unexplored scientific material.

"The moon is naturally struck by meteoroids, and those impacts form part of the geological record that scientists are trying to understand," Lefort wrote. "The main concern is the alteration of the moon's physical and chemical environment, particularly where repeated disturbances could damage or obscure valuable scientific evidence."

Gregory Radisic, a space law expert at Australia's Bond University, told Space.com that the Falcon 9 crash was timely, as it can stir debate about responsible behavior in space before the moon gets too busy.

"It's not by good planning that this didn't hit something important," he said. "It's by pure luck that we're only having a conversation about theoretical problems down the line and that this did not destroy a million-dollar experiment or an important site of scientific study."

He added that spaceflight companies may start paying attention to the risks only after human lives are lost or expensive infrastructure suffers, resulting in tangible fines and consequences.

"When there is a loss of life or a loss of investment, the industry will start to care," Radisic said. "As long as things are losing aesthetic or scientific value, the industry is not likely going to care."

The Falcon 9 rocket stage that hit the moon was left in a high-altitude orbit around Earth in January 2025, after it propelled Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience landers to the moon.

McDowell explained that, as the rocket stage was left relatively close to the moon, it got repeatedly influenced by lunar gravity, eventually spiralling into its surface.

"If you leave [an object] in an orbit that's in this middle region that is far enough that the moon's gravity is affecting it but not far enough out to go into orbit around the sun, then that orbit is very hard to predict," McDowell said. "The orbital uncertainties multiply over many passes and, eventually, if you get unlucky, the moon tugs it into an orbit where it's going to hit either the moon or Earth in a completely unpredictable way."

McDowell said that, since the January 2025 launch, SpaceX has been pushing its moon-mission rockets farther out into orbit around the sun.

"I hope that we're going to see a new norm evolve, and that what we have seen now is not how you dispose of your rocket stages in the future," he said. 


The moon dust has settled after a 4.5-ton SpaceX rocket body slammed into terrain near Einstein Crater on Aug. 5.

That impact site was imaged by South Korea's moon-orbiting Danuri spacecraft, as well as by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Reportedly, a Chinese commercial space debris monitoring satellite tracked and recorded the 5,400-mph (8,690-kph) moon punch, too.

Wandering through space for over a year, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost-1 lander on its way to the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2's Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. While the moon has reclaimed its serenity, the implications of the uncontrolled collision continue to reverberate.

Close encounter

Interestingly, there was also the prospect of a too-close-for-comfort conjunction of the Falcon 9 upper stage and Danuri.

"We noticed roughly late June that there is an incoming Falcon 9 upper stage toward the moon, and also knew that it would be close to Danuri," Eunhyeuk Kim, a senior researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), told Space.com.

There was a huge uncertainty in the predicted trajectory of the upper stage, Kim said, while the orbit information of South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter was quite accurate. "Therefore, we could not neglect the probability of an incoming and close encounter."

Spacecraft maneuver

However, around mid July, the KARI/Danuri team performed a maneuver of the spacecraft in preparation of a near-total lunar eclipse on Aug. 28, said Kim. That eclipse will see 96% of the moon's visible surface passing through Earth's dark umbral shadow.

Kim said that the orbiter's maneuver brought a slight change in the phase of the spacecraft's orbit, which canceled the probable conjunction between the upper stage and Danuri.

At the time of the Aug. 5 impact, Danuri was flying over the moon's south pole area, far away from the hit zone, said Kim.

High-speed ejecta

Dean Sladen is a quality manager and aerospace engineer in the United Kingdom for Accu Components, a high-precision manufacturing firm.

"As space agencies and private companies build out permanent lunar infrastructure, uncontrolled rocket stages evolve from a minor nuisance into a tangible operational risk," Sladen told Space.com. "A direct hit is the obvious worst-case scenario, but distant impacts also generate ground shocks and high-speed ejecta that can degrade sensitive equipment over time."

Sladen noted that lunar impacts have been a constant throughout history, with meteorites and comets bombarding the surface unhindered by an atmosphere. "Over the past 65 years, artificial objects have added a new dynamic to these events," he added.

Genuine hazard

Even modest hardware impacts permanently alter the lunar landscape, said Sladen. Given the moon's lack of a substantial atmosphere, there is no air resistance to slow debris down. An impact therefore hurls high-speed ejecta (fine regolith and rock fragments) across vast distances at bullet-like speeds.

"While this isn't a major threat to isolated missions today, as we establish permanent lunar infrastructure, high-velocity ejecta poses a genuine hazard to surface habitats, solar arrays and working astronauts," Sladen said.

To mitigate this issue, Sladen suggested that the industry will likely need designated impact zones or strictly controlled, targeted de-orbit protocols to ensure that spent hardware lands far from active installations.

"That said, human-made debris is only half the equation," Sladen continued. "Natural meteorites remain an ongoing background threat, and, while massive natural strikes are rare, they hit at significantly higher speeds and carry far more energy," Sladen said. "Controlling our own hardware is simply the part of the risk profile we actually have the power to manage."

Plume detections

In the meantime, while the Falcon 9 impact was tough to see from Earth, several observations from our planet reported the detection of sodium and lithium gas above the crash site.

The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, for example, saw the aftermath of the impact. The ESO reported that a chemical fingerprint of the impact was visible for five to 10 minutes, with an enormous plume of lunar material stirred up due to the hard-hitting hardware.

"I'm happy that ESO recorded some evidence of it through VLT, and Danuri has found the exact impact location," said William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin who performed some pre-strike computer simulations.

"What we've learned so far is that the plume was too faint to see against the bright lunar surface, and only a large observatory telescope could pick some parts of it out against the dark sky, which is exactly what happened," Jo told Space.com. "The plume must have shot out high," he said, "and I'd like to know how high, or even whether we can replicate the signals."

Targets of opportunity

"Telescopes make the best spaceships," pointed out Elaina Hyde, director of the Allan I Carswell Observatory at York University in Canada. "We are always on the lookout for 'targets of opportunity' like this event."

Hyde organized a livestream event, training the observatory on the collision locale. They were unable to spot the impact, however.

"The lunar collision was not on our regular research program, but when it happened, we put it as a high-priority item to observe if the weather was clear," Hyde said. "Anything that happens quickly like this is often a target of opportunity, because you do not get a long time to plan the observation."

"However, since it was not visible from our location in Toronto, our 'null' or non detection can actually help to limit the estimates on how big the dust plume was and perhaps some of its properties," said Hyde.

Impact response

Also on the moon impact watch were observers using Lowell Observatory equipment in Arizona.

These researchers managed to measure a response from the rocket stage impact, spotting a sizable sodium and lithium gas plume that lasted between five and 10 minutes after impact, reported Carl Schmidt, an assistant research professor at Boston University's Center for Space Physics.

Observers at the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) in Happy Jack, Arizona used a long slit spectrograph to detect the plume. Graduate students from Boston University continue to analyze data gleaned from the moon wallop.

Bright lithium plume

"At LDT, we saw a bright lithium plume from the rocket body and fainter sodium [signature], likely from the surface itself," Patrick Lierle of Boston University told Space.com. "The bright lithium plume extends more than halfway up our field of view." The LDT results are also credited to Emma Lovett, a Boston University graduate student.

William Jo said he's looking forward to the release of observational data about the impact before he and colleagues can refine their lunar ejecta simulation model.

"That data, combined with our simulations, could tell us things like the composition of the lunar material, what orientation the impact hit at, and so on," Jo said.

Prolific NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has announced his retirement from the U.S. space agency after 30 years of public service.

NASA announced Fincke's decision on Wednesday (Aug. 12), celebrating his contributions to spaceflight and long career of accomplishments.

“Few people have had the opportunity to shape as many chapters of NASA’s history as Mike Fincke,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that day in a statement. Fincke departs as NASA's fourth-most flown astronaut, racking up a cumulative 549 days in space over four separate spaceflights. During those, he performed nine spacewalks and served twice as commander of the International Space Station (ISS). Most recently, he launched as pilot on SpaceX's Crew-11 mission to the ISS, stepping into the role of commander for ISS Expedition 74 from August 2025 to January 2026.

Before his acceptance into NASA's 16th astronaut class in 1996, Fincke earned two bachelor's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in aeronautics and astronautics as well as Earth science, atmospheric and planetary sciences. Following his time at MIT, he did a summer stint at the Moscow Aviation Institute and later earned master's degrees in aeronautics and astronautics, and in planetary geology from Stanford and the University of Houston-Clear Lake, respectively.

Fincke also served in the U.S. Air Force prior to his career at NASA. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School in 1994, then was assigned as a space systems engineer and flight test engineer at Edwards and Eglin Air Force bases in California and Florida, respectively. Those stints were followed by his role as U.S. flight-test liaison for the Japanese-U.S. XF-2 fighter program in Japan.

Following his two years of astronaut-candidate training, Fincke was assigned to NASA's Astronaut Office Station Operations Branch's Crew Test Support Team in Russia. There, he served as ISS CAPCOM (Spacecraft Communicator) and ISS crew procedures team lead until he began official spaceflight training in 1999.

His first rocket launch was aboard the Soyuz TMA-4 mission to the ISS in 2004, where he served as science officer and flight engineer for Expedition 9 and completed four EVAs (extravehicular activities, or spacewalks).

Fincke's second launch brought him back to the ISS in 2008, as a member of Soyuz TMA-13. It was then that Fincke took command of the space station for the first time. As Expedition 18 commander, Fincke added two more EVAs to his career total and oversaw the preparation of ISS facilities to begin supporting an increase from three-person to six-person crews.

Fincke was also aboard for the final launch of NASA's space shuttle Endeavour on the STS-134 mission in 2011, which returned him to the ISS for a third time. As mission specialist and robotic-arm operator, he supported the installation of the space station's dark-matter-hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) instrument, and performed three additional EVAs that marked the official completion of ISS orbital assembly and were the last-ever spacewalks by a space shuttle crew.

By 2014, Fincke was serving as chief of the Astronaut Office’s Commercial Crew Branch, where he played a key role in the development and testing of the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner spacecraft. In January 2019, he was assigned to Boeing’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission as joint operations commander, and he remained on the prime crew until June 2022, when he transitioned to the CFT backup crew.

Fincke's most recent mission, Crew-11, launched to the ISS in August 2025. It was the second time he was appointed commander of the space station, this time for Expedition 74, but his stint, and that of the other Crew-11 astronauts, was cut short due to an unexpected medical issue.

Leading up to what would have been his 10th career EVA, NASA abruptly canceled spacewalk prep by Fincke and fellow NASA astronaut Zena Cardman after a "medical concern" arose that took priority over the planned station maintenance. Though not considered an emergency, the episode was deemed serious enough for NASA to return the Crew-11 astronauts to Earth earlier than expected, and Fincke and his fellow crewmates safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon a week later.

During the mission, NASA did not reveal the afflicted astronaut's name and condition, citing privacy concerns. A little more than a month after Crew-11's return, however, NASA and Fincke revealed that he was the crew member who experienced the medical issue, which he later described as a temporary inability to speak, according to an Associated Press report. Fincke fully recovered from the episode and is now in good health.

“Mike approached every assignment with experience, humility, and an unwavering focus on the mission,” said Scott Tingle, chief of NASA's Astronaut Office, in the agency's announcement. “Whether flying aboard the station, supporting crews from the ground, or helping shape the spacecraft that future crews will rely on, he consistently strengthened our team. His legacy is woven into the way we fly today.”

NASA did not indicate if Fincke plans to continue his involvement with the space industry through the private sector, but did highlight his dedication to support humanity's drive to explore the cosmos.

"I remain deeply committed to the work of exploration," Fincke said in the statement. “NASA gave me the extraordinary privilege of serving alongside remarkable people, flying and helping develop spacecraft, and contributing to the International Space Station from its earliest days through command in orbit … I am excited to carry those lessons forward and help prepare the next generation of engineers, explorers, and leaders."

Just over 12 hours after its first liftoff of the day out of Florida's Space Coast, SpaceX has delivered a second batch of Starlink internet satellites to orbit on a rocket lifting off from the company's California launch site.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Aug. 12, at 12:46 p.m. EDT (0346 GMT; 9:46 p.m. local time). The mission, Starlink Group 17-49, carried 24 of the broadband spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO) to join SpaceX's growing constellation of more than 10,000 satellites.

About 8.5 minutes after clearing the tower, the Falcon 9's first stage, Booster 1103 successfully landed on SpaceX's "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean." It was the fifth flight for this particular booster.

In addition to being its third Starlnk mission, B1103 also launched the NROL-179 and SDA-T1TL-E in support of U.S. national defense.

Following separation from Falcon 9's main booster, the rocket's second stage flew onward to LEO, delivering its 24 Starlink satellites about one hour after liftoff.

Today's liftoff was the 94th Falcon 9 launch of the year, 73 of which have delivered Starlink stacks to the growing constellation — the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.

Starlink currently consists of more than 10,900 active satellites, according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. But SpaceX has even bigger megaconstellations in mind: The company has filed to operate 100,000 of its bigger, more capable Starlink V3 satellites, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has also stated his intent to launch a million AI data center satellites to Earth orbit as well.

SpaceX isn't a launch company anymore.

SpaceX is famous for launching, and landing, its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and sending astronauts to space aboard its Dragon crew capsule. Recently, however, the company has been transitioning into an artificial intelligence (AI) outfit — and that journey is now mostly complete.

"Our AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue probably in September — like, next month — and will significantly exceed all other SpaceX revenue in in the fourth quarter," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said during an address to employees that the company posted on X today (Aug. 11). "So, AI has become an extremely important part of SpaceX's future."

Earlier this year, SpaceX bought xAI, a startup that Musk founded in 2023. xAI created the chatbot Grok and also operates a powerful supercomputer cluster in Tennessee called Colossus.

But that was just the beginning. Musk laid out just how deeply SpaceX is diving into AI during his 29-minute talk, which came a week after SpaceX's first-ever quarterly earnings call as a public company.

"Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX; I'd say five years for sure," Musk said. "And the value of SpaceX will be some astronomical number."

Astronomical is right. According to Musk, the company aims to get 10 gigawatts of AI compute up and running by the end of next year. That's a big jump from its current 1.4 GW, which SpaceX sells to tech companies and AI labs.

"The value per watt is probably going to be 30 to $50, which means if we bring 10 gigawatts of AI online by the end of next year, it will be 300 to $500 billion a year in revenue," he said. "Big numbers."

And those numbers will get even bigger over time, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX just announced plans to build a gigantic complex in Texas called Terafab, a joint operation with Tesla that will manufacture advanced semiconductor chips for a wide range of applications. And the company aims to launch a million of its "Starmind" AI satellites to low Earth orbit in the coming years using its fully reusable Starship megarocket, which is still in development.

Over the longer haul, the company plans to establish factories on the moon that will build these off-Earth data centers. The satellites will be launched into space from the lunar surface via electromagnetic mass drivers — basically, high-powered rail guns.

SpaceX envisions Starmind and its other AI efforts as returning almost unimaginable profits down the road. For example, in paperwork the company filed just before its record-breaking IPO, SpaceX identified an eventual "total addressable market" of $28.5 trillion, nearly $23 trillion of it in the AI field.

For some perspective: The gross domestic product of the entire United States last year was about $30.8 trillion.

"The future is fundamentally AI and robots," Musk said during his address to employees. "Assuming civilization continues to progress, I think that AI will probably — the amount of digital intelligence will probably be more than a trillion times the amount of biological intelligence."

He also said he's not just in this for the money.

"It's important that we have an AI that cares about humanity, that fosters humanity and helps take us to other planets and other star systems," Musk said.

"This is why I think it's essential that SpaceX succeed not just with AI hardware but also with AI software," he added. "I think an AI that is sort of SpaceX's baby will be a very good AI. I think SpaceX is a collection of some of the very best humans on Earth, both in capability and morality and goodness."

He urged SpaceX employees to aid the company's AI efforts in any way that they can, stressing that success could lead to some amazing vacations.

"One of the nice benefits of this also is that anyone at SpaceX who wants to go to the moon or Mars will be able to go in the future," he said. "You have my word."

Editor’s note: The original headline of this story read “in 2027,” which was incorrect, given that SpaceX aims to get 10 GW online by the end of that year. It was corrected at 8:20 p.m. ET on Aug. 11.

SpaceX sent yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites skyward today (Aug. 11).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 11:58 a.m. EDT (1558 GMT), carrying 29 of the broadband spacecraft toward low Earth orbit (LEO).

About 8.5 minutes later, the rocket's first stage made a pinpoint landing in the Atlantic Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was the 18th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1085.

Though more than half its liftoffs have been Starlink flights, B1085 also has some astronaut missions under its belt. The booster lofted SpaceX's Crew-9 flight to the International Space Station in September 2024, and it launched the Fram2 mission around Earth's poles six months later.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the 29 Starlink satellites to LEO today. They'll be deployed there 64 minutes after liftoff, if all goes to plan.

Today's liftoff was the 93rd Falcon 9 launch of the year already. Seventy-two of those missions have been devoted to building out Starlink, the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.

Starlink currently consists of more than 10,900 active satellites, according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. But SpaceX has even bigger megaconstellations in mind: Eventually, the company wants to operate 100,000 of its bigger, more capable Starlink V3 satellites, and Elon Musk has stated an ambition to launch a million AI data center satellites to Earth orbit as well.

Rainer Zitelmann has doctorates in history and sociology. He has authored and edited 32 books that have been translated into 35 languages. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Without property rights in space, one of the most important economic incentives for the commercial development — and ultimately the settlement — of celestial bodies is missing. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits states from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies or land on them. The underlying idea reflected the dominant thinking of the time: space belongs to all mankind.

The question of whether private individuals or companies may acquire property rights remains unresolved. The treaty says nothing explicitly about private ownership, largely because in the 1960s hardly anyone imagined that, just a few decades later, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos would possess the financial resources and technological expertise to accomplish what was then thought possible only for governments.

The absence of property rights is one important reason why humanity has made less progress in the exploration and development of space than many expected. Once the United States had won the race to the moon, the incentive for the next stage of space exploration largely disappeared.

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that whoever reaches an asteroid with a spacecraft and begins mining it acquires the right to claim ownership of that asteroid and list it on the stock market as a real estate investment trust (REIT). Or imagine that whoever reaches Mars and begins constructing a settlement — whether with robots or eventually with human settlers — gains the right to declare the surrounding land as private property. Such rights would create extraordinarily powerful economic incentives. Today, by contrast, the legal position of private actors is, at best, uncertain. A genuine race to reach these celestial bodies would begin, and investors would emerge to finance these ambitious ventures.

There are good reasons to believe, however, that this process will begin even without a clear legal framework. History suggests that this is not the exception but the rule. Consider the settlement of the American West. In his classic book "The Mystery of Capital," the renowned economist Hernando de Soto described the process as follows:

"America was filling up with immigrants, who settled boundaries, ploughed fields, built homes, transferred land and established credit long before governments conferred on them any right to engage in these acts. Those were the days of the pioneers and the 'Wild West.' One of the reasons it was so wild was that those pioneers, most of them nothing but squatters, insisted that their labor, not formal paper titles or arbitrary boundary lines, gave land value and established ownership. They believed that if they occupied the land and improved it with houses and farms, it was theirs."

Contrary to a common misconception, property rights did not initially emerge through formal acts of government imposed from above. They evolved spontaneously from below. As de Soto explains: "To be legitimate, a right does not necessarily have to be defined by formal law. That a group of people strongly supports a particular convention is enough for it to be upheld as a right and defended against formal law." Only later, during America's early history, did governments formally legalize what settlers had already established in practice.

Capitalism, unlike socialism, develops as a spontaneous order from below. We have seen this pattern repeated in more recent history, particularly in former communist countries such as China and Vietnam.

Long before the official ban on private farming was lifted in 1982, peasants across China spontaneously reintroduced private ownership in defiance of socialist doctrine. The results were remarkable. Agricultural production rose rapidly, and recurring food shortages came to an end. By 1983, almost all agriculture in China had been decollectivized.

The story was similar in Vietnam. Following the market-oriented reforms launched in 1986, poverty declined from nearly 80% to just 3%. Yet many of these reforms merely legalized developments that had already taken place at the grassroots level. Agricultural collectives and even state-owned enterprises increasingly ignored official regulations. They abandoned collective production and entered into unauthorized contracts ("Khoán chui") between collectives and families or between state farms and private traders. This became known as "Phá rào," or "fence breaking."

Some scholars argue that these spontaneous grassroots developments — not decisions by the Communist Party — were the true driving force behind Vietnam's reforms. As Vietnamese researcher Vu Le Thao Chi explains, "It is closer to the truth of the matter that the state served more as an agent of adjustments and, in this, sanctioned the manner of the ordinary farmers' efforts to survive the unpredictably winding path." Economist Tran Thi Anh-Dao and other scholars likewise argue that Vietnam's reform process began "with evidence-based practices at the microeconomic (local) level that were then applied at the macroeconomic (national) level."

In my recently published book "New Space Capitalism," where I discuss the legal issues in detail, I answer the question "Who should have the right to acquire property in space?" as follows: Those who have the financial resources and are willing to take the risks necessary to get there, develop the land, and put it to productive use.

If SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and begins building permanent settlements on the Red Planet, then ownership of land should initially belong to SpaceX. Not the entire planet, of course, but a practical area — for example, roughly the size of Singapore. Since the surface area of Mars is approximately 200,000 times larger than Singapore, SpaceX would initially own only about 0.0005% of the planet. That would be sufficient to establish multiple settlements while leaving more than enough room for future competitors.

SpaceX could finance its transportation and development costs by placing this Martian land into a real estate investment trust (REIT) and listing it on the stock exchange. The market would determine its value.

The same principle could apply to asteroids. At least in the case of smaller celestial bodies, ownership could be granted to those capable of mining valuable resources such as water or platinum. The most practical solution would likely be to place the entire asteroid into a publicly traded REIT. Investors would finance the mining operations, while shareholders would ultimately receive dividends generated by resource extraction. Even before the first dollar of revenue was earned or the first dividend paid, a functioning market for these shares could emerge.

This is, of course, only a thought experiment. But it shows one way in which property in space could come into existence, creating the foundation for humanity to unlock the vast economic potential of space.

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.

A new way to move around Earth's outer atmosphere could soon get a field test.

The Spanish company Kreios Space plans to launch into orbit the world's first satellite that uses scooped-up air to push it forward, the company announced on Tuesday (Aug. 4).

The technology Kreios Space has been developing is called air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP). It relies on air sourced from Earth's atmosphere, which is then heated up, ionized and expelled to generate thrust.

This method will allow satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO) — the region from roughly 60 miles to 250 miles (100 to 400 kilometers) above our planet — to counteract atmospheric drag without the aid of liquid fuel.

"Kreios is building the satellites that make sustained operations in very low Earth orbit possible," Kreios Space CEO Adrián Senar said in the Aug. 4 announcement.

"By enabling satellites to fly lower, longer and more efficiently, we are enabling higher-resolution Earth observation, much better satellite communications, more responsive and accurate missions and a more sustainable orbital infrastructure," he continued.

Kreios Space chose Lithuanian-based Kongsberg NanoAvionics to provide the satellite bus that will carry the ABEP system into orbit for the test run.

"Kreios is tackling one of the most demanding operating environments in space, and this mission joins a very short list of European VLEO initiatives," Kongsberg NanoAvionics CEO Atle Wøllo said in the same statement.

"Our engineering team has worked closely with Kreios to configure the MP42 satellite bus to the mission's specific requirements and support the integration of Kreios' technology," he added.

Kreios Space did not give a target launch date for the mission in Tuesday's statement, saying that the company will launch it "at a time when interest in and development of VLEO technologies has accelerated." But the company's website identifies 2027 as a notional target for its first space mission.

A new, very low frontier

Satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) — altitudes of roughly 100 miles to 1,200 miles (160 to 2,000 km) — generally don't need constant propulsion. Usually, a small boost from traditional thrusters here and there is enough to keep a LEO satellite on the right track. To power the thrusters, these satellites usually have some form of fuel built in.

VLEO works differently. It's low enough that there's still some atmosphere present, which generates drag on spacecraft. If you want a satellite to move around VLEO, it'll need to employ propulsion most or all of the time to counteract that drag. Any fuel that the satellite brings with it therefore won't last long.

So, if satellites are going to operate in VLEO, it would be very helpful to have a method of propulsion that doesn't require traditional fuel — a method like ABEP.

Satellites in VLEO have a few advantages over those operating in LEO, like sharper imagery thanks to the closer vantage point. One of the biggest advantages is that VLEO is much less crowded. There are thousands of satellites in LEO — most of them SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft — and the number is growing all the time. But VLEO has plenty of room.

If ABEP technology works and companies start outfitting satellites with this new propulsion method, then we might start seeing satellites operate quite close to Earth, zooming through the atmosphere and using the air around it to stay on course.

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.

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.

A spent rocket body hitting the moon made headlines this week, but the reality is that the unplanned collision by a SpaceX upper stage was just the latest in a long history of human-made objects meeting their end by impacting the lunar surface.

Astronomers around the world kept their telescopes trained on the moon early Wednesday morning (Aug. 5), when the rocket stage from a January 2025 U.S. commercial lunar landing mission was calculated to strike the celestial body. Though the fate of the SpaceX Falcon 9 part was unintentional — solar activity and gravitational forces caused the stage to slam into the moon — the impact offered a rare opportunity to try to observe the flash from the impact and the plume of lunar material it sent flying.

By noon (EDT) on Wednesday, there were no confirmed reports of the impact being caught on film, but a telescope in Chile spotted the debris plume, according to the Associated Press.

"This rare occurrence has decades of history, going back to the Apollo era," wrote Jared Isaacman, NASA's administrator, in a post to his social media accounts. "The reality is that meteoroids strike the lunar surface hourly, with impacts comparable to this upper stage occurring roughly every six days."

Inventorying the impacts

The moon is peppered with the scattered metal remains of missions that missed their mark, came down too quickly or were purposefully sent careening into the regolith to learn more about the makeup of Earth's natural satellite.

In fact, the very first mission to successfully fly by the moon was intended to be an impactor. The former Soviet Union's Luna 1 probe was designed to hit the moon but instead zoomed past its target and entered orbit around the sun on Jan. 2, 1959.

Luna 2, launched nine months later, became humanity's first object to reach the lunar surface, purposefully slamming into Sinus Lunicus ("Bay of Lunik"), along the southeastern edge of Mare Imbrium, on Sept. 14, 1959.

The U.S. followed suit, though not as NASA intended, with the Ranger 4 probe impacting the far side of the moon on April 26, 1962. The mission had included an impactor, but both it and its lander failed to operate due to a failure to deploy the spacecraft's solar arrays.

Once humans began arriving on the moon with NASA's Apollo program, scientists found another reason to direct spent rocket and spacecraft stages into a collision course with the surface. Beginning with Apollo 11 in 1969 and concluding with Apollo 16 in 1972, seismometers were placed on the moon to measure natural "moonquakes" and the effects on the moon when the missions' Saturn SIV-B stages and Apollo lunar module descent stages made hard landings.

The data collected helped geologists learn more about the interior makeup of the moon, including that a rocky mantle exists under the outer crust.

After Apollo, planned impacts (and missions) slowed down, if not outright stopped, but the SpaceX collision on Wednesday was not the first in more than 50 years. Between 1993 and today, 11 probes — four from China, three from Japan, two from the U.S. and one each from India and the European Space Agency (ESA) — were intentionally deorbited at the end of the end of their missions around the moon.

Some of these impacts were performed to discard the craft, but others — like Lunar Prospector, LCROSS and Chandrayaan-1 — helped confirm the presence of water by examining the resulting plume.

Unintentional collisions are fewer in number, as are rocket stages, but are not unprecedented. A rocket body that hit the moon's far side in March 2022, leaving behind a small double crater, was later identified as a Long March 3C rocket that launched China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014.

Litter versus liability

Without a large human population on the moon, the risk that these planned and unplanned impacts present at current is minimal. But the concern rises as NASA and other world space agencies, as well as commercial interests, begin to increase the pace on establishing their now-planned sustainable facilities for astronauts to live and work on the lunar surface.

"The future lunar base will incorporate reusable spacecraft that not only deliver astronauts and payloads, but also become part of the infrastructure itself," Isaacman said in his post, referring to how reuse can be a way to reduce the number of vehicles needed to be discarded of on the moon.

The Artemis Accords, an internationally agreed-upon set of standards led by NASA and currently signed onto by 70 countries, also includes a provision for its members that spacecraft and their associated rocket components must be disposed of safely.

Early this morning, a SpaceX rocket slammed into the moon at seven times the speed of sound. Now, lunar orbiters are trying to get a look at the aftermath.

This morning (Aug. 5) at about 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 GMT), the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the moon. To dissect what exactly happened, scientists are looking for imagery of the crash site, with the help of a couple of moon probes.

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery."

While you've likely seen the first stages of Falcon 9 rockets gracefully land back on Earth for reuse, the rocket's 9,000-pound (4,000 kilograms) upper stage is disposable. Typically, it's sent to burn up in our atmosphere after its missions are over.

However, that wasn't possible with this rocket, which launched two private lunar landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon 9 upper stage used most of its fuel getting to this distant location and couldn't make it back to deorbit in Earth's atmosphere.

So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.

"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.

But the rocket body was still subject to natural forces, which acted on it over time.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said.

The Falcon 9 upper stage ended up slamming into the moon this morning at about 5,400 mph (8,690 kph). It likely blasted out a crater up to 89 feet (27 meters) wide, according to scientists' calculations.

This was certainly not the original intended outcome for this rocket. But it presents an opportunity for researchers, who plan to take advantage of it to learn more about the moon.

"NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office will attempt to image the impact around the predicted time using ground‑based telescopes at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville [Alabama]," Garner added. "Because the impact flash and plume are expected to be faint, the chance of seeing anything from Earth remains low, and local weather can affect observations as well. Any data collected will help scientists better understand impacts from artificial objects and the potential effects on future lunar exploration."

Today's impact took place on the sunlit side of the moon, the brightness of which made observations difficult for skywatchers hoping to watch the crash from afar with telescopes. But the two lunar orbiters might be able to see not just the crash and impact crater but also the plume of dust kicked up by the rocket's death dive.

So far, observations from Earth have revealed some information. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

Such images of the event would provide "an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," researchers led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico wrote in a recent paper discussing the then-upcoming event.

So hold tight, as researchers are now eagerly collecting and analyzing the images captured by these orbiters, and we might get images of the rocket crash, the lunar plumes and remaining aftermath soon.

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.