Update Oct. 3, 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched its 125th Falcon 9 rocket of 2025, which carried a batch of Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit. The company’s first mission of the month took flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base shortly after sunrise on Friday morning.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) happened 7:06 a.m. PDT (10:06 a.m. EDT / 1406 UTC). This was SpaceX’s 47th launch from Vandenberg so far this year.
SpaceX launched this mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number B1097. This was its second launch following Starlink 17-8 on Sept. 3.
More than eight minutes after liftoff, B1097 performed an autonomous landing on the drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You. This was the 155th touchdown for this vessel and the 514th booster landing for SpaceX to date.
The 28 Starlink satellites onboard were deployed from the rocket’s upper stage a little more than an hour after liftoff.
Mind the gap
This was the first time since SpaceX began launching Falcon 9 rockets in 2010 that flew three Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg uninterrupted by one of its missions from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station or NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
That may very well be due to tropical activity, prompted by storms like Hurricane Humberto and Hurricane Imelda, which created hazardous conditions in the Atlantic Ocean and at SpaceX’s launch sites for several days. As of Thursday at noon, the National Hurricane Center was currently tracking two disturbances, with one forecast to move diagonally across the Florida peninsula over the next few days.
There were just a handful of instances of back-to-back Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg for one reason or another. Prior to now those have included the following (dates based on UTC launch time):
- Starlink 17-9 (Sep. 6, 2025) – SDA T1TL-B (Sep. 10, 2025)
- Starlink 11-11 (April 7, 2025) – NROL-192 (April 12, 2025)
- Starlink 11-8 (Jan. 21, 2025) – Starlink 11-6 (Jan. 24, 2025)
- Starlink 9-17 (Sep. 20, 2024) – Starlink 9-8 (Sep. 25, 2025)
- Starlink 8-8 (June 8, 2024) – Starlink 9-1 (June 19, 2024)
SpaceX has been pushing to increase their launch cadence from Vandenberg Space Force Base, which allows instance like this to be possible. Right now, SpaceX is permitted to launch up to 70 times from the West Coast, according to the U.S. Air Force.
In a post on his X account on Monday, Kiko Dontchev, vice president of Launch for SpaceX said that the company was “one tropical system away from hitting 17 (launches) in September” across all three of its current launch pads.
“Special shout out to the entire west coast team for their first ever 8 launch/month,” Dontchev said. “It’s also the first time since October 2019 that Vandy launched 50% or more of the manifest.”
Congrats to the entire @SpaceX team for another 16 Falcon launch/month. We were one tropical system away from hitting 17 in September, but we’ll take recovery impacts over landfall any day!
Special shout out to the entire west coast team for their first ever 8 launch/month.… https://t.co/SguihyvgIY
— Kiko Dontchev (@TurkeyBeaver) September 29, 2025
SpaceX is eyeing up to 100 launches from the West Coast through a combination of both SLC-4E and SLC-6, assuming permission is granted by the U.S. Air Force. The latter pad would be outfitted to allow up to five Falcon Heavy launches per year.
Beyond Starlink missions, SpaceX also has some notable customer flights remaining on the manifest for 2025. Those include the November launches of both Transporter-15 ride share and the Sentinel-6B spacecraft, the latter of which is a NASA-led mission in partnership with the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT (the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), NASA, and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales, French Space Agency).
SpaceX is also preparing to launch the next batch of satellites for the Space Development Agency no earlier than Oct. 14. The SDA is aiming for a nearly monthly cadence for this constellation, so there may be two more launches on tap before the end of the year.
source: spaceflightnow.com