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SpaceX Falcon 9 booster fires up ahead of NASA launch and surprise drone ship landing
SpaceX has successfully fired up a new rocket ahead of what is now believed to be a surprise Falcon 9 booster drone ship landing, to follow shortly after the company’s upcoming CRS-19 Cargo Dragon resupply mission for NASA.
Around 5:30 pm EST (22:30 UTC) on November 26th, a Falcon 9 rocket – featuring a rare unflown booster – successfully performed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and ignited all nine of its first age Merlin 1D engines, verifying the rocket’s health and perfectly simulating a launch right up to the point of liftoff. With that routine static fire complete, SpaceX now has a luxurious seven days to bring the rocket horizontal, roll it back into LC-40’s integration and processing hangar, install Cargo Dragon atop the second stage, and roll the fully-integrated rocket back out to the launch mount.
According to NASASpaceflight.com reporter Michael Baylor, SpaceX decided to swap boosters, moving Falcon 9 B1056.3 to a commercial satellite mission and assigning B1059.1 to Cargo Dragon’s NASA CRS-19 resupply mission. Prior to visual confirmation of this shift, NASA and SpaceX had indicated interest in flying Block 5 booster B1056 for a third time after it successfully completed its second launch and landing for NASA on July 25th, 2019. That would have been the first time NASA certified a twice-flown SpaceX booster to launch a NASA mission, a critical step along the path to making booster reuse routine – even for SpaceX’s highest-profile customers.
Instead, B1056.3 is now scheduled to launch the Kacific-1/JCSAT-18 commsat no earlier than December 15th, while CRS-19 is scheduled to lift off at 12:51 pm EST (17:51 UTC) on December 4th. As with most other missions designed to quickly rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS), CRS-19’s launch window is effectively instantaneous, meaning that any issue during the countdown or day-of preparations will force a ~24-hour recycle.
Aside from it being unclear why exactly NASA, SpaceX, or both parties decided against launching B1056 for the third time on CRS-19, the mission features another minor mystery. Instead of using the performance left over from such a light launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) to return the booster to launch site (RTLS) and land at SpaceX’s LZ-1/2 landing pads, it appears that Falcon 9 B1059 will attempt to land aboard drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY).
Since April 2016, SpaceX has only once intentionally recovered Falcon 9 by sea after a Cargo Dragon launch. That particularly recovery occurred during CRS-17 in May 2019, just a few weeks after Crew Dragon capsule DM-1 catastrophically exploded just prior to an attempted static fire test located adjacent to LZ-1/2. That explosion littered the area with evidence, precluding Falcon 9’s planned LZ-1 recovery in the same way that a police helicopter would likely try to avoid landing directly on top of an active crime scene. In that case, extraordinary attenuating circumstances were required before SpaceX redirected a CRS launch’s booster recovery to a drone ship.
Seemingly lacking similarly extraordinary circumstances, it remains to be seen whether SpaceX or NASA will offer an explanation for the unexpected change in plans. On the plus side, an unexpected Falcon 9 drone ship landing also means an unexpected Port Canaveral return, which should offer increasingly rare views of a once-flown Falcon 9 booster.
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Routinely reusable spacecraft
As expected, CRS-19 will become the second orbital launch of a twice-flown Cargo Dragon capsule, flexing SpaceX’s reusability muscles in the much less forgiving realm of orbital spacecraft. On July 25th, CRS-18 became the first such mission to reuse a twice-flown spacecraft, leaving SpaceX with several additional twice-flown Cargo Dragon capsules as the only plausible options for its remaining three CRS1 missions.
SpaceX says that CRS-19’s Cargo Dragon capsule previously flew CRS-4 (Sept 2014) and CRS-11 (June 2017), identifying it as capsule C106. As it turns out, C106 supported SpaceX’s first Cargo Dragon capsule reuse, making it a fairly historic vehicle – the first commercial orbital spacecraft reused in history. Beginning with CRS-3, Dragon 1 vehicles were designed to support up to three orbital missions each, leaving SpaceX with four possible capsules (C110-C113) capable of supporting CRS-20, Dragon 1’s last planned launch.
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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk shed two new bits of detail on Starship following its 13th test launch, which was an overwhelming success.
SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time last Friday after two delays: one on Monday when several Raptor engines did not ignite, and another on Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions in Starbase, Texas.
The launch was overwhelmingly successful. SpaceX was able to complete a necessary test of the heat shield tiles by increasing the acceleration of Starship from launch throughout the flight; 20 Starlink v3 satellites were released with no issue; the Super Heavy Booster landed safely in the Gulf of America, Ship successfully reignited engines while in space; and it also splashed down without incident in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Nevertheless, more details are coming out about Starship, and Musk is doing the talking.
Starship Will Be Retrieved in the Ocean
Musk revealed on Tuesday night that Starship would be recovered by a ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX routinely tries to recover Starship after splashdown in an effort to find out more about the flight by examining the spacecraft afterward.
We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship https://t.co/fUqUZTITO9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2026
This helps engineers find out more about why things might have happened, allows them to examine any potential damage or anomalies that might have occurred, and increases the chances of an even more successful flight next time thanks to the additional information recovered.
Ship Could Have Been Caught by Tower Arms, Musk claims
Musk has already indicated that SpaceX will plan to attempt a catch of Starship with the 14th test flight. While this would be a major accomplishment, it would be an expected next step, considering the fact that the Super Heavy Booster has already been caught by the chopsticks on numerous occasions.
The ship landing was precise, meaning that it would have been caught by the tower arms https://t.co/6nbNrRfX9P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
A ship catch would be a great indication of where SpaceX stands in terms of reusability and launch cadence. A successful catch with relatively no incidents would be a good sign that SpaceX is nearing a more frequent launch of Starship, but also that the reusability of the massive rocket would be something many would expect in the near future.
It is a necessity to make life multiplanetary.
Elon Musk has updated his timeline for when humans will walk on Mars and for when ships will simply get there.
The objective of getting to Mars has been one of Musk’s biggest goals since becoming a serial entrepreneur and realizing that time on Earth is limited. Musk has said several times he hopes to die on Mars, and not by impact.
Musk now believes that people will be on Mars in “roughly 5 to 7 years.” He said that a Mars lander will get there “a few years sooner.”
People on Mars in roughly 5 to 7 years.
Mars lander a few years sooner.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
The response from Musk comes after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that SpaceX’s biggest priority is the Moon and not Mars. Because of this, Isaacman conceded that he believes nuclear power and propulsion investments will provide “potentially the pathway with the fewest miracles required to put four people on Mars in the next 10 to 15 years.”
Of course, this is what NASA can do through taxpayer funding and nuclear investments, he added.
Musk’s grand ambitions are much more optimistic than most, and it is certainly a double-edged sword. This is not the first time timelines for Mars have been somewhat lofty, especially to those normal thinkers like you and me, not super geniuses like Musk.
In fact, the SpaceX and Tesla frontman has said on at least a dozen occasions that we could be on Mars in the coming years. Musk said 2020 would be the big year as early as 2009. In 2020, he was “highly confident” of a landing in 2026, and had even said 2024 in a best-case scenario.
The point is, the range has varied, and it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get there. This latest adjustment to the timeline is typical of Musk, and while the Moon has seemingly taken priority over Mars, it is still worth mentioning that the ultimate goal is to make life multiplanetary, and it starts potentially with the Red Planet.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
