Tag: SpaceX
-
Starship Flight 14 Targets First Earth Orbit and 26 Starlink V3 Deployments
SpaceX is targeting Tuesday, September 22, 2026, for Starship’s 14th flight test from Starbase in South Texas. The mission would be Starship’s first attempt to enter Earth orbit and is planned to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites. A 75-minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time, pending regulatory approval. Previous Starship tests followed suborbital…
-
SpaceX Falcon 9 Landing Team Wins First Neil Armstrong Space Prize for Pioneering Reusable Booster Landings
Purdue University presented its first Neil Armstrong Space Prize to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team on September 15, 2026, at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. Announced in April, the award recognizes the team’s development of vertical booster landings, which made repeated first-stage reuse a routine part of orbital launches. Five SpaceX employees accepted…
-
NASA Powers On Roman Space Telescope Instruments During Journey to L2
Roman is still traveling to its destination in space, with NASA gradually powering on and checking its instruments along the way. NASA has activated the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument and completed initial checks of its Coronagraph Instrument, the agency said Sept. 15. The observatory, launched Aug. 30 on a SpaceX…
-
SpaceSail, China SatNet and Starlink: Why Satellite Internet Constellations Need So Many Satellites
On the morning of September 16, 2026, the Gravity-1 Y3 rocket lifted off from waters east of Shanghai and placed eight SpaceSail constellation satellites into orbit. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology subsequently announced that 256 SpaceSail satellites had now been launched.[1] The data centers, fiber-optic cables and base stations underpinning terrestrial internet services…
-
SpaceX Sets Sept. 22 for Starship’s First Orbital Flight and Starlink V3 Deployment
SpaceX is targeting Sept. 22, 2026, for the first orbital flight of its Starship launch system, a roughly 10-hour mission that will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites and send the spacecraft around Earth six times before a planned Pacific Ocean splashdown. Flight 14 is scheduled to lift off from Starbase in South Texas during a…
-
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Fuel Savings Extend Potential Mission Life to 22 Years
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could support at least 22 years of science operations—more than double its original 10-year fuel budget—after a highly accurate trajectory-correction burn used less than one-tenth of the propellant allocated for the maneuver, the agency announced September 14. Roman launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30 aboard a SpaceX…
-
SpaceX Sets USSF-259 Launch, Second Classified Space Force Mission in Six Days
SpaceX is preparing to launch the classified USSF-259 mission for the U.S. Space Force from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on September 16, marking the company’s second national security flight from the base in six days. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Space Launch Complex 4 East during a four-hour window…
-
Inside the Global Reusable Rocket Engine Race: Who Is Defining the Next-Generation Heart of Spaceflight?
If rocket engines could only be used once, the space economy would remain an expensive one-way journey. But as Falcon 9 first stages repeatedly return to their landing sites and Raptor engines fire again and again aboard Starship, that logic has been fundamentally rewritten: engine reusability is becoming a decisive factor in launch costs, flight…
-
SpaceX Launches Final O3b mPOWER Satellites on 700th Falcon Mission (Video)
SpaceX launched three Boeing-built O3b mPOWER communications satellites for SES on September 13, completing the Luxembourg-based operator’s 13-satellite medium Earth orbit constellation while marking the 700th mission by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket family. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:49 p.m. EDT, or…
-
SpaceX’s Nasdaq-100 Weighting Set to More Than Double in September Rebalance
SpaceX is expected to more than double its weighting in the Nasdaq-100 Index when the benchmark completes its quarterly rebalance later in September, potentially generating billions of dollars in mandatory purchases by index funds and exchange-traded funds. Preliminary Nasdaq data indicate the company’s weighting could rise from approximately 1.28% to 2.82%, with the final allocation…