Falcon 9

SpaceX has delayed the launch from California of a Falcon 9 rocket with a U.S.-French environmental monitoring satellite from Thursday to Friday, allowing more time to review the source of moisture in two of the launcher’s booster engines.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral early Sunday with a commercial Japanese robotic moon lander and a NASA hitchhiker micro-payload called Lunar Flashlight that will seek out signs of water ice hidden in the permanently dark floors of craters at the moon’s poles.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, a small briefcase-size CubeSat that could break new ground in the search for water ice on the moon, is hitching a ride to space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with the privately-developed Hakuto-R moon lander after missing a launch opportunity on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission.

Forty more OneWeb internet satellites rocketed into orbit from Kennedy Space Center at sunset Thursday, the company’s first launch with SpaceX after suspending flights on Russian rockets earlier this year. A senior OneWeb official said the company has booked an extra launch with SpaceX, adding to a contract signed earlier this year.

OneWeb’s broadband network will get a boost from SpaceX, which operates its own internet constellation, with the launch of 40 satellites on top of a Falcon 9 rocket set for Thursday from Kennedy Space Center.

SpaceX is expected to roll a Falcon 9 rocket back into its hangar at Cape Canaveral for troubleshooting, postponing the planned launch of a Japanese commercial moon lander for an unspecified period. SpaceX provided no details about the reason for grounding the rocket.

A commercial moon craft developed by the Japanese company ispace is awaiting launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will send it on a five-month trajectory culminating in a lunar landing attempt next year, an achievement that could make ispace the first private company to accomplish the feat.

Despite a bleak weather forecast, SpaceX took advantage of a break in cloud cover over Cape Canaveral Tuesday night to launch a Falcon 9 rocket with the Eutelsat 10B satellite, a high-throughput relay platform to beam in-flight WiFi signals and maritime data services across a coverage zone from the North Atlantic to the Middle East. SpaceX did not attempt to recover the Falcon 9’s first stage booster.