News
SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 launch in months gets a launch date
SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 launch in more than three months finally has a launch date and it looks like the company’s growing fleet is going to attempt to catch (or land) almost every piece of the rocket, a big first for Falcon 9 reusability if SpaceX can pull it off.
After an exceedingly long wait, SpaceX’s next launch – Starlink’s first “v1.0” mission – is finally on the Eastern range and is scheduled to launch no earlier than ~10 am ET (15:00 UTC) on November 11th, recently confirmed by SpaceFlightNow.com and LaunchPhotography. Although similar lulls in US orbital launch activity have occurred in the past, they are extremely rare: the last time a lull more than three months long occurred was in 2010.
For SpaceX, this is the longest the company has gone without a launch since Falcon 9’s last catastrophic failure, which grounded the rocket for ~4.5 months after a massive explosion in September 2016. By all appearances, the likely 14-week gap between orbital SpaceX launches is little more than the product of bad luck, with customer payloads and SpaceX payloads both coincidentally requiring more time than expected to prepare for flight.
Although the extreme delay between launches is unfortunate, it also happens to have given SpaceX’s recovery engineers a lot more time to prepare the latest member of the rocket recovery fleet for its first attempted fairing catch. Known as GO Ms. Chief, she joins fairing recovery vessel GO Ms. Tree (formerly Mr. Steven) and has spent the last two or so months being outfitted with a brand new net and arms – slightly different but nearly identical to Ms. Tree’s.
Pictured in Stephen Marr’s tweet at the top of this article, Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief appear to be more or less complete, and Ms. Chief took to the Atlantic Ocean with her net installed for the first time just over a week ago. If the ships are as prepared as they look, there’s a strong chance that Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief will be able to team up to attempt the first simultaneous catch of both halves of a Falcon payload fairing. At the moment, SpaceX has caught a single parasailing fairing half twice during its last two consecutive attempts, a strong sign that the company has solved what proved to be an extremely challenging problem.
Falcon 9’s next reusability milestone
As always, prior to launch, SpaceX will fuel and static fire the Falcon 9 rocket to verify that all systems are performing nominally. According to NASASpaceflight.com, that static fire test is scheduled no earlier than Tuesday, November 5th, approximately six days before launch.
Speaking last month, VP of Flight and Build Reliability Hans Koenigsmann stated that Starlink-1 would fly on a thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster, meaning that the mission will likely mark the first time SpaceX flies the same Falcon 9 booster four times. At this point, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5 nth-reuse milestones are becoming less and less surprising as it becomes clearer than ever that the rocket upgrade – designed to support “at least” 10 launches per booster – is well on its way to reaching that goal.
At the moment, the most likely candidates for that fourth-flight milestone are Falcon 9 boosters B1048 and B1049, the former of which flew its third orbital mission in February 2019, while the latter supported SpaceX’s dedicated Starlink v0.9 launch debut in May 2019. Falcon 9 B1046 – also with three launches under its belt – is scheduled to fly for the fourth (and probably final) time as early as mid-December for Crew Dragon’s critical In-Flight Abort Test, while Falcon 9 B1047 flew its third and final mission in August 2019.
All things considered, SpaceX’s quasi return-to-flight after three months without a launch is set to be an exceptionally important mission for Falcon 9 and should be well worth the wait.
Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.
-
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
