Falcon 9

SpaceX launched one of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket boosters for the last time Saturday on a rare expendable mission for Intelsat, devoting all of the launcher’s propellant toward placing a pair of television broadcasting satellites into orbit. Intelsat says it paid SpaceX an additional fee for the expendable mission.

SpaceX launched the second in a series of three Falcon 9 rocket missions early Thursday for the European satellite operator Eutelsat, delivering to orbit a television broadcasting craft that also hosts an EU-funded payload to provide precise navigation data to airplanes.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket at 1:22 a.m. EDT (0522 GMT) Thursday from Cape Canaveral with Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13G television broadcasting satellite. The Falcon 9’s first stage booster landed on a downrange drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

One day after launching a triple-body Falcon Heavy rocket a few miles up the coast, SpaceX rolled its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket to a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Wednesday for a late night mission to haul a Eutelsat television broadcasting satellite into orbit.

SpaceX fired a Falcon 9 rocket off a launching stand in California at sunset Thursday, producing a twilight sky show visible as far away as Texas as the mission delivered 53 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit.

SpaceX sent another batch of 53 Starlink internet satellites into orbit Thursday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 6:14 p.m. PDT (9:14 p.m. EDT; 0114 GMT).

Fifty-four Starlink internet satellites fastened to a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral, continuing SpaceX’s deployments for a broadband network reaching into an ever-expanding market linking rural households, ships, commercial airplanes, and Ukrainian military forces in their fight against Russia.

Engineers investigating the Oct. 12 launch failure of a Japanese Epsilon rocket have traced the problem to the attitude control system on the second stage, Japan’s space agency said Tuesday.

An Airbus-built communications satellite rocketed into orbit early Saturday from Cape Canaveral on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher, bound for a high-altitude perch in geostationary orbit to beam hundreds of TV and radio channels to Eutelsat customers across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.