Mission Reports

SpaceX hauled a Globalstar communications satellite into orbit early Sunday from Cape Canaveral, pulling off the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in 36 hours, the fastest sequence of three missions by any commercial launch company in history.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 12:27 a.m. EDT (0427 GMT) Sunday with the Globalstar FM15 satellite, a spare spacecraft for Globalstar’s commercial voice and data relay constellation.

Globalstar is set to add a spare spacecraft to its commercial data relay network early Sunday with a launch from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but the satellite operator remained silent about the mission on the eve of liftoff.

A four-ton radar observation satellite for the German military soared into orbit Saturday from California on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, beginning a 10-year mission to collect all-weather reconnaissance imagery.

A German military reconnaissance satellite rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Liftoff is occurred at 7:19 a.m. PDT (10:19 a.m. EDT; 1419 GMT), and the Falcon 9’s first stage booster returned to Vandenberg for landing about eight minutes later.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 booster for a record-breaking 13th time Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, hauling 53 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit as astronomers renew concerns about the growing brightness of the latest generation of the broadband relay spacecraft.