SpaceX is set to launch its penultimate Falcon 9 rocket of the month with a mid-morning flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday.
The Starlink 17-19 mission will add another 25 satellites to its megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. Among the satellites will be the 11,000th Starlink satellite launched by the company since its first batch of production satellites were flown in May 2019.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East is scheduled for 8:42:10 a.m. PST (11:42:10 a.m. EST / 1642:10 UTC). The rocket will fly on a south-southwest trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1082. This will be its 19th flight after launching missions, like USSF-62, NROL-145 and OneWeb Launch 20.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1082 will target a landing on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ If successful, this will be the 174th touchdown on this vessel and the 565th booster landing to date.
So far in 2026, SpaceX launched seven batches of Starlink satellites between its pads at Vandenberg Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. With those launches, it added 195 satellites to LEO.
