SpaceX

NASA will hold a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Sept. 4, to discuss the agency’s upcoming Sun and space weather missions, IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. The two missions are targeting launch on the same rocket no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23. The IMAP mission will map the boundaries of our heliosphere, the vast bubble created by the Sun’s wind that encapsulates our entire solar system. As a modern-day celestial cartographer, IMAP will explore how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space, as well as chart the range of particles that fill the space between the planets. The IMAP mission also will support near real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles. These energetic particles can pr...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars past the American flag at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as it began the Starlink 10-14 mission on Aug. 31, 2025. Image: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now Update Aug. 31, 8:15 a.m. EDT: SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 booster on the drone ship. SpaceX capped off the month of August with a Sunday morning sunrise Starlink mission. This was the company’s ninth time launching its broadband internet satellites this month alone. All told in 2025, following the deployment of the 28 satellites on the Starlink 10-14 mission, SpaceX will have deployed more than 1,900 of its Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit across 77 Falcon 9 launches. Its latest flight lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 UTC...

NASA astronaut Megan McArthur has retired, concluding a career spanning more than two decades. A veteran of two spaceflights, McArthur logged 213 days in space, including being the first woman to pilot a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and the last person to “touch” the Hubble Space Telescope with the space shuttle’s robotic arm. McArthur launched as pilot of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission in April 2021, marking her second spaceflight and her first long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station. During the 200-day mission, she served as a flight engineer for Expeditions 65/66, conducting a wide array of scientific experiments in human health, materials sciences, and robotics to advance exploration of the Moon under Artemis and prepare to send American astronauts to Mars. Her first space...

A group of technicians works to complete final inspections and checkouts of NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft inside a cleanroom at Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Florida. Image: John Pisani / Spaceflight Now Technicians inside a pair of clean rooms at the Astrotech facility in Titusville, Florida, are busily readying a trio of spacecraft that will study the Sun and its effects on Earth and across the solar system. The primary mission among the trio is NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), which will use a suite of 10 instruments to study the Sun’s sphere of influence, referred to as the heliosphere. It’s joined by the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, another NASA mission, and the Space Weather Follow-On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO...

SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage booster completes a landing on the droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ during the Starlink 10-56 mission on Aug. 27, 2025. The recovery was the 400th landing of an orbital class rocket. Image: SpaceX A Falcon 9 rocket placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit shortly after sunrise on Wednesday and scored the 400th successful drone ship landing for SpaceX’s reusable first stage booster. The achievement came about eight and a half minutes into the Starlink 10-56 mission, which lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:10 a.m. EDT (1110 UTC). The B1095 first stage booster, making its second flight, touched down on the drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’ (JRTI) stationed in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Carolinas. The majorit...