Flight 14 lifted off Monday at 8:49 a.m. EDT and reached orbit about 26 minutes later, releasing all 26 of its Starlink V3 satellites. Starship lost an engine shortly after launch, so SpaceX cut the planned 10-hour, six-orbit flight short and brought the ship down in the North Pacific after 3 hours and 9 minutes. SpaceX plans to use the vehicle to loft as many as 100,000 of the upgraded Starlinks.
Dragon docked at 7:05 p.m. EDT on October 1, 7 hours and 55 minutes after launch, the fastest any American spacecraft has reached the ISS. Jessica Watkins commands the four-person crew, the first Black woman to command a spacecraft. The flight had slipped from mid-September while SpaceX replaced a faulty valve in the propulsion system.
NASA and Boeing said an uncrewed test flight is expected no sooner than the end of this year, followed by a year or more of review before people fly. Both said they remain committed to the spacecraft, two years after it returned from the ISS without Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Varda Space Industries closed a $251 million Series D led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital, with Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst among the other investors. The El Segundo company has now raised $598 million and says its first product made in space for use on Earth will be a pharmaceutical.
Pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud have spent months at the China Astronaut Research and Training Centre learning Mandarin and training for weightlessness. One will become the first foreign astronaut aboard Tiangong. China has not said which, and the mission is part of wider cooperation that includes a Pakistani rover planned for Chang'e 8.
The batch opens Eutelsat's 669-spacecraft renewal of the OneWeb constellation, now built in Europe. The satellites are being prepared to ship from Toulouse to a launch in the United States.
The Kockelscheuer facility will design, build and test satellites in house, starting with SES's next-generation medium Earth orbit network, and anchors Luxembourg's planned Space Campus.
NROL-97 lifted off from Pad 39A at 11:54 p.m. EDT on October 1, and both side boosters landed back at the Cape. Space Systems Command ran the launch for the spy satellite agency.
The Space Development Agency plans to launch the first half of Northrop Grumman's 42 Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites at 1:15 a.m. PDT on Monday, October 5, on a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg.
After more than 50 years of missile warning, the final two DSP satellites flew a Space Command maneuver exercise in September and were then sent to a graveyard orbit, the service said October 1.
The company is asking for permission to fly New Glenn far more often from the Cape while it recovers from the pad explosion in May.
The former head of NASA science leaves ETH Zurich to lead Blue Origin's Advanced Concepts team, which develops new systems for living and working in space.
The multi-year agreement covers 20 StriX radar satellite launches from New Zealand from 2028 through 2031. It is the largest commercial Electron contract to date and brings Synspective to 47 Electron missions.
Honda announced October 1 that it will work with Redwire on robots to help crews aboard commercial stations.
W-8 and W-9 rode Transporter-18 to orbit and will be run together from Varda's expanded mission operations center in El Segundo. The company has brought six capsules home since 2024.
The rideshare Falcon 9 lifted off through the coastal fog at 11:32 a.m. PDT on October 1 with a prototype Google AI satellite among its payloads.
The instrument, designed to block starlight so planets and dusty disks can be seen, turned on its cameras in space on September 22 and produced a focused test image. It is the first step in a series of increasingly complex checkouts.
Summaries are written by From Blue to Black. Headlines and reporting belong to the linked publications.