Falcon 9

SpaceX teams in Florida and California are preparing for three missions from three launch pads in three days, beginning Friday with a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a reusable Falcon 9 booster flying for a record 13th time.

SpaceX launched an Egyptian communications satellite toward a high-altitude geostationary orbit Wednesday from Cape Canaveral. It was the first commercial launch of a geostationary payload this year, another sign of a market shift toward smaller, lower-orbiting communications satellites.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday from Cape Canaveral with a telecom satellite for Egypt’s Nilesat. The Falcon 9 lifted off with the Nilesat 301 telecom payload at 5:04 p.m. EDT (2104 GMT), and the first stage booster landed on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

An Egyptian-owned communications satellite is nestled in the nose cone of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday from Cape Canaveral, heading for an orbital position more than 22,000 miles over the equator.

A spare satellite for Globalstar’s data relay and messaging constellation will launch from Cape Canaveral on a Falcon 9 rocket later this month, multiple sources said, in a previously-undisclosed mission on SpaceX’s schedule.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight — a small spacecraft to measure water ice in dark craters near the moon’s poles — will now launch as a piggyback payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket late this year after delays caused it to miss a ride on the agency’s Artemis 1 mission.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday packed with 59 small satellites and research experiments, including an innovative commercial water-propelled orbital transfer vehicle from Momentus and a pair of NASA tech demos testing laser communications and proximity operations.

Fifty-nine small satellites and hosted experiments launched Wednesday at 2:35 p.m. EDT (1835 GMT) from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The reusable Falcon booster returned to Florida’s Space Coast for landing about eight-and-a-half minutes later. The mission is the fifth for SpaceX’s Transporter smallsat rideshare program.

Nanoracks will fly an experiment with a small articulating robot arm on SpaceX’s Transporter 5 rideshare mission this week to demonstrate metal cutting in orbit, a test lasting just minutes that could advance in-space manufacturing technology to help convert used rocket stages into space habitats.