Falcon 9

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.

SpaceX’s third Starlink satellite delivery mission in five days departed Florida’s Space Coast just after sunrise Wednesday, adding 53 more mass-produced communications spacecraft to the company’s broadband internet network.

SpaceX’s third Starlink satellite deployment mission in five days launched at 6:59 a.m. EDT (1059 GMT) Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A Falcon 9 rocket carried 53 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit.

A transport ship delivered the SES 22 and Nilesat 301 geostationary communications satellites to Cape Canaveral over the weekend to prepare for two launches on SpaceX rockets in June, completing a trans-Atlantic journey from France originally planned on Russian-owned cargo planes.

Less than 24 hours after launching Starlink satellites from California, SpaceX lofted another 53 internet relay stations at 4:40 p.m. EDT (2040 GMT) Saturday from Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It was SpaceX’s 20th launch of the year, and the second of 2022 to debut a new Falcon 9 booster.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Friday afternoon from California’s Central Coast with another batch 53 Starlink internet satellites, pushing the total number of spacecraft launched in the network above 2,500, including testbeds and prototypes already cycled out of the fleet.