SpaceX

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...

A SpaceX Starship-Super Heavy rocket thunders away from Starbase, Texas to begin the Starhip Flight 10 mission on Aug. 26, 2025. Image: SpaceX Running two days late, SpaceX launched its huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket Tuesday, chalking up what appeared to be a remarkably successful test flight in the wake of three back-to-back failures earlier this year. While re-entry heating damaged a protective “skirt” around the the engine bay of the upper stage Starship, along with partially melting a control flap near its hinge, the vehicle remained under control throughout and made it all the way to a powered splashdown in the Indian Ocean as planned. “Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting tenth flight test of Starship!” SpaceX said in a post on X. Earlier, ...

Several people wander the dunes surrounding Launch Pad A at Starbase, Texas, to marvel at the fully integrated Starship rocket designed to launch Starship Flight 10. Image: Stephen Clark / Ars Technica Update Aug. 25, 8:22 p.m. EDT: An anvil cloud forced a mission scrub. SpaceX was once again unable to launch the 10th test flight of its Starship rocket from southern Texas as soon as Monday evening, but it ran into weather problems. Anvil clouds over the launch site were the culprit behind the prevented launch. They presented a lightning risk, which wasn’t able to clear in the time available to SpaceX once they started fueling. The Monday evening scrub followed a scrub on Sunday connected to an issue with its liquid oxygen system at the launch site. A new launch attempt could come as soon a...

An unpiloted SpaceX Dragon capsule loaded with 2.5 tons of supplies, research material and needed equipment approaches the International Space Station over western Africa. Image: Sen 4K camera An unpiloted SpaceX cargo ship docked at the International Space Station early Monday, delivering more than 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies including 1,500 tortillas, the crumb-free bread substitute for crews dining in weightlessness. Launched Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the cargo Dragon closed out a 28-hour rendezvous with an ahead-of-schedule docking at the lab’s forward port at 7:05 a.m. EDT as the two spacecraft were passing 260 miles above the Ivory Coast of Africa. “We’d like to say thanks to everybody who made the cargo and loaded the cargo and...