A Russian satellite just took a very close look at an American spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

A few days ago, the snooping satellite Kosmos 2612 rendezvoused with ICEYE-X36, a commercial craft that observes our planet using synthetic aperture radar (SAR).

The close encounter, which occurred between Oct. 15 and Oct. 19, was reported by Marco Langbroek and other satellite trackers, with Langbroek calling it "a worrisome cat-and-mouse game" in orbit. The rendezvous has garnered a lot of attention in space circles, because it was non-consensual and startlingly close; at one point, the two spacecraft may have been separated by just a few meters. What did Russia hope to gain from it?

Not an isolated incident

Before tackling that question, we need to set the stage a bit. For example, it's important to note that inspections aren't unheard of in the final frontier. Russia, the United States and China have all maneuvered satellites into close proximity of other nations' hardware in recent years.

Most of this activity has taken place in geostationary orbit, which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude, orbital velocity matches our planet's rotational speed, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over one patch of Earth continuously. GEO is therefore a popular destination for spy, communications and weather satellites — and for spacecraft designed to shadow and assess them.

Kosmos 2612 is operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), which is part of the reason its activities have created such a stir. Neither China nor the U.S. has conducted an uncooperative rendezvous in LEO, as far as we know. But Russia has, according to Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability for the nonprofit Secure World Foundation.

"They've done a few," she told Space.com. "Kosmos 2543 got within about 30 kilometers [19 miles] of USA 245 in January 2020, and then Kosmos 2558 got within about 70 kilometers [43 miles] of USA 326 in August 2022. And they've done repeated approaches to 326."

Kosmos 2612 got much closer to its target than those other inspectors did, of course. And there's another big difference: USA 245 and USA 326 are classified spy satellites managed by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, while ICEYE-X36 is a private Earth-observing craft.

Eyes in the sky

There are about 80 ICEYE spacecraft in LEO at the moment. They image our planet using SAR, which can peer through clouds and gather data both day and night. Some of these satellites are operated by ICEYE, a company based in Finland, while others are managed by its American subsidiary, ICEYE US. ICEYE-X36 is one of the latter.

At least some ICEYE satellites provide imagery to Ukraine, which Russia invaded in February 2022 and continues to assault with ground troops and missile and drone attacks. Indeed, ICEYE signed a contract this past January firming up this data-sharing relationship with Ukraine.

"The agreement ensures that the Ministry of Defence continues to receive a high volume of high-resolution satellite imagery through ICEYE's world-leading SAR constellation, supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces with persistent situational awareness on tactical timelines," ICEYE representatives said in a January statement.

That likely explains Russia's interest in ICEYE satellites, which is extensive and longstanding. For example, Kosmos 2612 launched in April of this year with five other spacecraft. In May, four members of this fleet, including Kosmos 2612, conducted maneuvers to get into a co-planar orbit with ICEYE-X36. Such maneuvers use a lot of fuel and are therefore not performed lightly. (It's unclear if ICEYE-X36 is dedicated to capturing imagery of Ukraine or Russia, but Russia certainly seems to think it is.)

However, we still don't know the purpose of Kosmos 2612's close approach (which is apparently over, at least for now), Samson stressed.

There are a few possibilities. For example, Russia may want to get a better idea of ICEYE satellites' capabilities, and/or figure out what exactly they're studying on Earth below. Or maybe Kosmos 2612 was actively interfering with ICEYE-X36 in some way — messing with its sensors, perhaps, or blocking or intercepting its communications with the ground.

However, Samson leans toward another explanation.

"I think they're getting frustrated," she said of the Russians.

"They've been kind of in a stalemate, particularly for the past six months or so. And so I think it's just more a matter of demonstrating military prowess in a manner that the Ukrainians cannot respond to," she added. "The Ukrainians are just as good, perhaps even better than, the Russians on drones. But when it comes to space stuff, they're not peers, and this is just a way to remind everyone that that's the case."

As Kosmos 2612's activities show, space is becoming an increasingly competitive and contested domain. The U.S. has long held the advantage above Earth, fielding the most capable reconnaissance and communications craft, but Russia and China are challenging that dominance.

This drama is unfolding above our heads now, and it affects everyone on the planet. Samson therefore wishes that governments around the world were more forthcoming about their space activities — for example, that we learned about Kosmos 2612's shenanigans from the U.S .Space Force rather than from private companies and civilians who pore over government tracking data.

"I think it just speaks to the importance of transparency, and sharing information about these sort of things," she said. "As much as you may want to, you cannot keep the existence of satellites classified, because people can see them."

SpaceX will soon notch a huge spaceflight milestone, if all goes according to plan.

The company will try to catch both stages of its Starship megarocket during the vehicle's next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX's quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).

If SpaceX succeeds, this "will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered," Musk said. "The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness."

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.

As Musk noted, both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.

Starship's recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its "chopstick" arms.

This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.

Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.

Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)

"I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said. "And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year."

Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft.

The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today's call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX's financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.

And that performance was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.

Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX's launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments — connectivity (services provided by its Starlink megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, "superintelligence").

SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That's why it's building the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year — to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it's positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.

"In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of '27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion," Musk said.

SpaceX just launched its mysterious "Starfall" return capsule for the second time ever.

Starfall was one of 32 payloads on the company's Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission, which launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 7:04 a.m. EDT (1104 GMT) today (Oct. 20) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

SpaceX has been relatively quiet about Starfall, which debuted this past June on a Falcon 9 launch from the Cape.

That June 23 flight was a dedicated demonstration mission for Starfall, designed to show that the capsule can fly in a controlled fashion and survive the harrowing downward trip through Earth's atmosphere.

And those will be Starfall's main jobs. The vehicle "will enable affordable, routine access to the microgravity environment for scientific research and in-space manufacturing," SpaceX in a June 23 X post, one of the few public statements the company has made about Starfall.

Indeed, most of the details that we have about the capsule come from an environmental assessment that was published by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in May.

According to that document, the disk-shaped Starfall is roughly 2.5 feet (0.75 meters) tall and 10.2 feet (3.1 m) wide. It weighs about 4,600 pounds (2,100 kilograms) and can bring 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) of payload back down to Earth.

Starfall wasn't the only return capsule that went up on Bandwagon-5. Among the other 31 payloads on the flight was W-Series 7, the latest orbital "mini-factory" built and operated by the California company Varda Space Industries.

The W-Series capsules are designed to both host the production of valuable goods such as pharmaceuticals and bring them safely down to Earth, Varda has said.

The other payloads on Bandwagon-5 are a mix of "cubesats and microsats," according to SpaceX's mission description. Among the latter is Pelican-12, a sharp-eyed Earth-observation satellite built by the San Francisco company Planet.

The 32 payloads were deployed over a two-hour span beginning about 57 minutes after launch. Starfall will be the last to separate, releasing from the Falcon 9's upper stage two hours and 48 minutes post-liftoff.

The Falcon 9's first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth as planned on Bandwagon-5. It touched down about nine minutes after launch, coming down in the Atlantic Ocean atop the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was the 19th mission for this particular booster, according to the company.

Bandwagon is one of two SpaceX rideshare programs. The other, known as Transporter, has been busier, flying 18 missions to date.

The first Transporter mission, which lifted off in January 2021, delivered 143 payloads to Earth orbit, a single-launch record that still stands.

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan will launch an epic mission to Mars today (Oct. 19), and you can watch the action live.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to lift off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 local Japan time).

You can watch it live via the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Coverage will begin at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT).

As its full name suggests, MMX will focus on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They're both tiny compared to Earth's own moon; Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of about 8 miles (13 km).

They're also quite mysterious. While astronomers have a pretty clear understanding of our own moon's birth — it coalesced from material blasted into space when a Mars-sized planet slammed into Earth long ago — there's no consensus about Phobos and Deimos' origin story.

The duo "may be the remains of a massive impact on Mars that sent material into orbit around the planet, or they could be ancient asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity billions of years ago," Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in an Oct. 15 statement. (NASA is a partner on the mission, providing a scientific instrument, a technology demonstration, communication support and funding for American scientists on the MMX team.)

"Having the answer will help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds," Statler added.

MMX will help provide that answer, if all goes according to plan.

The spacecraft will arrive in the Mars system in August 2027, then slip into orbit around Phobos a month later. It will study that moon and Deimos from a distance for about 18 months, then deploy the French-German Idefix rover onto Phobos' surface in early 2029.

The 55-pound (25 kilograms) Idefix "has two main tasks: providing information to prepare for the landing of the main spacecraft to collect samples, and analyzing the composition and texture of Phobos' surface," European Space Agency officials wrote in an MMX mission description.

"The gravity on Phobos is so low that Idefix will only weigh the equivalent of 15 grams [0.5 ounces] on its surface!" they added.

The MMX mothership's Phobos landing will occur in 2030. The spacecraft will grab at least 10 grams (0.4 ounces) of samples from the moon, then head back toward Earth with this extraterrestrial bounty. MMX's return capsule will land here in 2031, after which scientists around the world will scrutinize the Phobos sample for clues about the history and evolution of Mars and our solar system more broadly.

MMX was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but issues with the H3 rocket prevented it from doing so. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so MMX had to wait a while for its next chance.

Japan already has an impressive sample-return track record. The country's Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, for example, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu a decade later.

The astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station wish that we could all see Earth as they just did.

An orbital view reveals the immense beauty of our blue planet, the only world we know of that hosts life. But it also highlights how fragile that life is, tethered to our lonely Earth in the vast void of space, according to Crew-12 commander Jessica Meir of NASA.

"You see this very thin, tenuous band of an atmosphere, and you know that that is all that is supporting life, and we really need to do our best to protect it," Meir said on Thursday afternoon (Oct. 15), during a press conference that discussed the recently concluded Crew-12 mission.

"I wish that I could bring all the eyes of all the humans to look back at the Earth in this extraordinary way that we are so privileged to have," she added. "I think it really does change you philosophically and [in] how you see each other, how you see yourself, how you see the human race when you look on it down from the vantage point that we have from above — you know, [it] gives everybody this understanding that we need to protect our planet, that it's not only so beautiful, but it's so precious."

From the International Space Station (ISS), Meir said, it's clear that everything on Earth is connected — and that the borders we've laid down between states and nations are artificial constructs.

"You realize that we really are one human when you are in space," she said. "I wish I could share that perspective with all the eyes of all the humans. I think it would be a very healthy thing for everyone to understand.

Crew-12 mission specialist Andrey Fedyaev, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, voiced similar sentiments, though he would turn an ISS visitor's eyes inward, to focus on the crew.

"I always say that the life of crewmembers on board the space station is the best example of how people need to live on Earth," Fedyaev said during Thursday's briefing (in Russian; in interpreter translated his words into English in real time)."

"We don't have borders. We are all friendly. We're just one crew, and the safety of the crew, the safety of the station, depends on the actions of the entire crew," he added. "So, if humankind does arrive at the same conclusion — that our Earth, our planet, is one and the same space vessel that flies through space — we need to take care of it and not to destroy it. So, that's what I would like to show to everyone on Earth."

Meir and Fedyaev are far from the only ones to have their perpsectives shifted by a space mission. Pretty much every astronaut experiences this phenomenon, which is known as the overview effect, a term coined in 1987 by space philosopher Frank White.

Crew-12 consisted of Meir, Fedyaev, NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway (the mission's pilot) and the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot (mission specialist). It was the second spaceflight for Meir and Fedyaev and the first for Hathaway and Adenot.

The quartet launched toward the ISS on Feb. 13 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Their Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, arrived at the orbiting lab a day later.

Crew-12 spent nearly eight months aboard the ISS, finally returning to Earth on Oct. 8. They conducted a wide range of scientific experiments and maintenance work during that time and set a few records as well.

For example, Adenot became the first French woman ever to perform a spacewalk, and she broke the mark for longest continuous spaceflight by a European at 237 days. The previous record, 201 days, was set by Luca Parmitano in 2019-2020.

Well, that was a memorable debut.

Tesla unveiled its highly anticipated new Roadster last night (Oct. 16) with a spectacular stunt, using SpaceX thrusters to make the vehicle "fly."

"This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car, OK?" Elon Musk, who runs both companies, said during the livestreamed reveal, which was held at SpaceX's rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas. "But it takes the the fun meter to 11 out of 10."

Tesla first announced the next-gen Roadster in 2017, saying at the time that it would be released in 2020. In 2018, Musk announced that the new car would incorporate some SpaceX tech.

"SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly…" he wrote on Twitter in June of that year. (In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, which he subsequently renamed X.)

So last night's demonstration didn't come entirely out of left field — but it was still eye-popping. The show began with the Roadster driving up a ramp that quickly became a vertical wall and then an overhanging ledge. The Roadster clung to the surface, hanging upside-down from the ledge like a gecko on a ceiling thanks to a special fan suction system on its chassis.

"I mean, this car really sucks, OK?" Musk said, channeling his inner stand-up comedian. "This car could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. It could suck a tennis ball through a hose pipe."

The suction feature is not just a novelty, he added: It will help the Roadster stay connected to the ground during high-speed turns, allowing drivers to corner incredibly well.

And the sucking was just an opening act. The Tesla soon launched itself from its position beneath the ramp's nearly horizontal ledge, executed a barrel roll in midair, and landed softly, all thanks to its SpaceX cold-gas thrusters.

"A friend of mine, Peter Thiel, once said that the future promised us flying cars, but instead we got 140 characters," Musk said after the Roadster touched down. "Well, not anymore."

The car has main thrusters in the rear, he explained, as well as attitude-control thrusters that control its orientation.

"So it can basically fly like a rocket, and it could do rolls," Musk said. "It could do, like, crazy gymnastics — whatever you want, really."

The Roadster has a total of 10 thrusters, which are fed by 600 liters — about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) — of compressed air, Tesla Engineering Vice President Lars Moravy said during last night's event. That air is housed in carbon fiber overwrapped pressure vessels, which fill "every usable void in the car," Tesla said via X last night.

The Tesla team put those thrusters to work multiple times during the presentation, at one point launching the Roadster over a line of six vehicles, including a Tesla semi-truck cab.

Nobody was behind the wheel during these stunts — nobody with a pulse, anyway. The driver's seat was occupied by a mannequin clad in a black-and-white SpaceX spacesuit.

This was a nod to "Starman," the dummy behind the wheel of Musk's cherry-red first-gen Roadster, which launched into orbit around the sun in February 2018 on the first-ever flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.

Starman and his Roadster are still in space, by the way, and will be for a while. Modeling work suggests the duo will keep orbiting our star for millions of years before ultimately slamming into either Earth or Venus.

Last night's Roadster demo was something of a tease, for the car is not yet in showrooms. Musk said Tesla aims to begin producing it in 2028.

And don't expect to see the "flying" version on the road then, or anytime; it's hard to imagine regulators certifying that vehicle for everyday use. It will likely be a status symbol for a few wealthy and connected folks, locked away in spacious and well-appointed garages.

Indeed, you can't put down on a deposit for the "Rocket" version of the new Roadster on Tesla's website; purchase of that vehicle is by invite only.

Two other Roadster versions are for sale — "Performance" and "Thrust." Tesla's website describes the Performance variant as "road ready," with "active aero and a multi-mode suction system." Thrust, by contrast, is "race ready." It has active aero and suction "plus acceleration thrusters."

It costs $50,000 to reserve a Performance vehicle and $250,000 to reserve a Thrust. Tesla has not yet revealed the total cost of any of the new Roadster variants.

The U.S. military must be ready to engage the enemy farther from home than ever before, according to its highest-ranking officer.

"Today's modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday (Sept. 16) during a keynote address at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

Cislunar space extends from Earth all the way out to the orbit of the moon and includes the lunar surface. For several years now, military officials have been stressing the strategic importance of this huge region, which could get quite a bit busier in the next decade or so.

For example, both the United States and China plan to build bases near the moon's south pole, which is thought to harbor large amounts of water ice. Winning this new moon race is critical, U.S. officials have stressed, because whoever does so will be able to establish norms of behavior on and around Earth's nearest neighbor.

China has already demonstrated impressive capabilities in the lunar sphere. In 2019, the nation's robotic Chang'e 4 mission pulled off the first-ever soft landing on the moon's mysterious far side. In 2024, Chang'e 6 returned far-side samples to Earth — another first.

Caine didn't cite such missions or even mention China by name. And he provided no details about what conflict on the cislunar battlefield might look like (though presumably it would be entirely robotic, with satellites seeking to take out adversary craft via jamming or blinding).

But he invoked the cislunar battlefield twice and noted that U.S. military branches cannot assume continued dominance of their various domains.

"Future conflicts will demand that we operate without the assumptions of uncontested access, secure rare areas or uninterrupted or uncontested sustainment," Caine said. "Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the joint force is prepared to fight, endure and win in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."

The United States' long-held advantage in the final frontier will be key to securing such victories, he added.

"We must continue to ensure that the United States of America can strike anywhere on the globe at the time and place of our choosing, and sustain that force," Caine said. "Our United States Space Force must provide unrivaled space superiority and sustain the associated networks, domain awareness [and] data advantage that the joint force needs to win in space, both now and in the future."

We now know that part of the Space Force's strategy for maintaining that crucial superiority is the operation of weapons in Earth orbit. The branch's chief, Gen. Douglas Schiess, admitted as much during an address at the same conference on Tuesday (Sept. 15).

"Let me be crystal clear: Today, guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks,” Schiess said during his speech. ("Guardian" is the official name for a member of the Space Force, just as members of the U.S. Navy are called sailors and members of the Army are soldiers.)

Schiess provided few details about these weapons but, later in the speech, implied that they are electromagnetic rather than kinetic in nature. That is, they're probably designed to knock out key systems of adversary satellites rather than destroy the entire spacecraft (which would create a cloud of potentially troublesome debris).

It's no surprise the U.S. possesses and employs such technology; the newsworthy bit is that a top official said it so openly. The nation's chief rivals in the space domain, China and Russia, possess advanced counterspace technologies as well. For example, both have destroyed defunct satellites with missiles and conducted close approaches of spacecraft with "inspector" vehicles.

The winners of the first-ever Neil Armstrong Space Prize just got their hardware.

Those awardees — the people who developed and mastered the famous landing capability of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket — were announced in April. But they didn't actually receive the prize until Tuesday night (Sept. 15), when it was bestowed during a ceremony at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.

And it was richly deserved, according to Purdue University, which created the international award and named it after perhaps its most famous alumnus. (Purdue is known as the "cradle of astronauts," because 30 of its graduates have flown in space or been selected as NASA astronaut candidates.)

"Neil Armstrong's achievement rested on extraordinary engineering, teamwork and the courage to attempt what had never been done before," Mark Lundstrom, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue, said in a statement on Tuesday.

"The Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team carries that spirit forward," he added. "By making rocket reuse practical at unprecedented scale, they changed the economics of spaceflight and opened new possibilities for science, exploration and commerce. It is especially fitting that they are the first recipients of the Neil Armstrong Space Prize."

Purdue wants the annual prize to become a sort of Nobel for space science and exploration. The inaugural honorees are five SpaceX employees, who represent the much larger Falcon 9 landing team:

• Lars Blackmore, senior principal Mars landing engineer
• Shana Diez, senior director of Starship reliability
• Jon Edwards, senior vice president of Falcon & Dragon projects
• Yoshiaki Kuwata, principal guidance, navigation and control engineer
• Eduardo Velazquez, director of Crew Starship engineering

The two-stage Falcon 9 debuted in June 2010. The rocket was always envisioned to have a reusable first stage, though making that happen took a while.

"On a simple hand calc, I thought, 'Oh, this would work,'" said Kuwata, who joined SpaceX in 2012.

"But then the difficult part is going from this hand calculation to the reality, and there are a lot of nuances that we learned on the way," he told Space.com. "And on paper, I think it would have been done in like six months. But it took like three, four years to actually get it to work."

The milestone moment occurred on Dec. 21, 2015, on the 20th Falcon 9 flight to date: The rocket's first stage came back to Earth for its first-ever vertical touchdown, landing at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (now known as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station) after sending 11 satellites to orbit for the company Orbcomm.

The Falcon 9 ticked another big box on April 8, 2016, acing a touchdown on a SpaceX "drone ship" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

These eye-popping sights have now become commonplace; to date, SpaceX has landed boosters more than 650 times during orbital missions. And these rockets don't stay on the ground for long. Six different Falcon 9 first stages now have more than 30 launches and landings under their belt, led by Booster 1067, which has flown a whopping 37 times.

Such extensive reuse has helped make the Falcon 9 the dominant rocket flying today. In 2025, the vehicle flew 165 missions — about half of the global total — and all of them were successful.

This success has inspired copycats. For example, two different Chinese rockets have landed successfully in the past few months, one of which employs foldable landing legs just like a Falcon 9 first stage.

But the imitation doesn't bother Velazquez.

"I think this is great," he told Space.com. "I mean, we didn't start from scratch, right? If you look at a cross section of our engines and the engines from the '60s, they're all very similar. So we're all kind of cribbing from the same place. But the fact that we are able to advance the bar so that everybody else is landing first stages is just great. I think we all move forward together, and we need more entrants in the field to really have a big kind of spacefaring economy and civilization."

SpaceX is planning to sunset the Falcon 9 in the relatively near future in favor of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other exploration tasks.

Starship has flown 13 test flights to date, all of them suborbital. SpaceX has already successfully recovered the giant vehicle's Super Heavy first stage on three occasions, catching the booster with the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower at its Starbase site in South Texas.

Such success follows quite naturally from the experience the company built up with the Falcon 9 (and its cousin the Falcon Heavy). But landing and reflying Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, is a different animal. (Falcon upper stages are expendable.)

"The bigger step change for Starship is the stage two — Ship upper stage — reusability," Kuwata said.

"In Monte Carlo simulations, [Ship landings] work well," he added. "And then we kind of demonstrated that pinpoint landing, precision landing, on the ocean many times. But I feel we will find out more things along the way by trying many times."

"Yeah, the 'trying many times' I think is kind of key," Velazquez said. "And I think we're getting pretty close to to catching a Ship."

Russia launched a cargo mission toward the International Space Station today (Sept. 16), delivering the freighter spacecraft to orbit for a three-day rendezvous journey.

The robotic Progress 96 spacecraft lifted off atop a Soyuz rocket from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today at 9:33 a.m. EDT (1333 GMT).

From engine ignition through solar array deployment on the spacecraft, the Progress 96 launch was completely nominal. It was "a flawless launch," said NASA's Rob Navias during the mission's livestream this morning, with "an excellent climb to orbit by the Soyuz booster."

Progress 96 is loaded with about 3 tons of food, propellant and other supplies for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The freighter will deliver this cargo three days after launch, if all goes according to plan. You'll be able to watch rendezvous and docking activities when the time comes.

The freighter will remain docked to the orbiting lab for about five months. It will then be loaded up with trash and sent down to a fiery death in Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

The Progress 94 spacecraft met this fate on Sept. 7, departing from ISS' Poisk module to make room for Progress 96.

Progress is one of four spacecraft that fly operational cargo missions to the ISS these days, along with Japan's HTV-X, SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus. All but Dragon are expendable, burning up in our air when their time in orbit is up.

There are currently seven people living aboard the ISS — NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir and Anil Menon; the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot, who last month became the first French woman ever to perform a spacewalk; and Pyotr Dubrov, Andrey Fedyaev and Anna Kikina of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10 a.m. ET on Sept. 16 with news of successful launch.

We now have a launch date for Starship's most ambitious mission to date.

SpaceX announced today (Sept. 15) that it's targeting Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more.

Liftoff, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.

The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Starship, which debuted in April 2023 and has flown twice so far in 2026. But the 408-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle's first 13 jaunts were all suborbital, so Flight 14 will be a landmark.

"By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin," SpaceX wrote in a Flight 14 mission description.

"This will also mark the first time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that will dramatically expand connectivity speeds and reliability around the world," the company added.

Starlink, SpaceX's network of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit, currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft. None of those are the larger, more capable V3 version, which are designed to launch on Starship.

Flight 14 will carry up 26 of these next-gen craft — the first of many, if all goes to plan. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company wants the Starlink megaconstellation to eventually consist of 100,000 V3 satellites.

Three of the Starlink craft launching on Flight 14 have been outfitted with cameras and will photograph the heat shield on Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, after deployment. SpaceX will use this imagery to study and potentially improve the heat shield, which protects Ship during its return trip through Earth's atmosphere.

If all goes according to plan on Sept. 22, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will complete six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers). The vehicle will then maneuver its way to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote in the mission description.

That's a very different plan than previous Starship flights. On those suborbital missions, Ship stayed aloft for just 65 minutes or so, did not complete an orbit of Earth and came down in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.

But Flight 14 will be more of the same for Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy. If all goes to plan, the giant rocket will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, as it has done on a number of previous flights.

So there will be no catch — of either Ship or Super Heavy — by the "chopstick" arms of Starbase's launch tower on Flight 14. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three occasions to date but has never done so with Ship. This recovery method will eventually be the norm on Starship flights, leading to faster and more efficient reuse of the vehicle, Musk has said.

So, while Flight 14 aims to check a very big box — reaching orbit — other milestones will be reserved for future flights. A Ship tower catch will be among the most anticipated, along with refueling the vehicle in orbit, something that will be required for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

SpaceX launched its second classified mission for the U.S. Space Force in less than a week tonight (Sept. 16).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 9:07 p.m. EDT (6:07 p.m. local California time; 0107 GMT on Sept. 17).

We don't know much about tonight's mission, which was called USSF-259. SpaceX's webcast didn't shed any light of note; it ended shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth for a landing in the Pacific Ocean atop a drone ship about 8.5 minutes after launch.

That touchdown was the 13th for this particular booster, which is designated 1097. One of the booster's previous landings was a big milestone for SpaceX. This past April, B1097 pulled off SpaceX's 600th touchdown of an orbital-class rocket, during a launch that sent 25 of the company's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit.

Tonight's mission was the second that SpaceX has flown for the U.S. Space Force in a six-day span: A Falcon 9 launched the similarly classified USSF-153 from Vandenberg on Sept. 10.

Tonight's launch was SpaceX's 110th of 2026. The vast majority of the company's flights so far this year — 106 of them, in fact — have been performed by the workhorse Falcon 9.

The powerful Falcon Heavy has launched twice in 2026, as has SpaceX's next-gen megarocket, Starship. Both Starship liftoffs this year have been suborbital test flights. The next Starship launch, which is expected to occur in the next two weeks, will apparently take the vehicle orbital for the first time.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:50 p.m. ET on Sept. 15 with the new launch date of Sept. 16. It was updated agai at 9:28 p.m. ET on Sept. 16 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

Two European Earth-observing spacecraft lifted off from South America tonight (Sept. 14).

A Vega C rocket carrying the FLEX and Copernicus-3C satellites launched from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 9:21 p.m. EDT (10:21 p.m. local time in Kourou and 0121 GMT on Sept. 15).

Both FLEX and Sentinel-3C were deployed as planned. They were released at an altitude of about 509 miles (820 kilometers), and both were flying freely by 116 minutes after launch.

The 875-pound (397-kilogram) FLEX will detect and monitor vegetation fluorescence, which explains its name (a shortening of "Fluorescence Explorer"). By doing so, it will map plant photosynthetic activity — something no satellite can do at the moment, according to ESA.

FLEX's data will be important not only "for a better understanding of the global carbon cycle, but also for agricultural management and food security," ESA wrote in a FLEX mission desription. "This is of particular relevance due to demand the growing world population is placing on the production of food."

Sentinel-3C is part of the European Union's Copernicus Earth-observation program. The 2,520-pound (1,1143-kg) satellite will continue the Sentinel-3 line, which is aging but still going strong in low Earth orbit; Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B, which launched in 2016 and 2018, respectively, remain active.

"Like its two older siblings in orbit, Sentinel-3C carries a suite of cutting-edge instruments that measure systematically Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics," ESA wrote in a Sentinel-3C description. "It provides essential information in near-real time for ocean and weather forecasting."

The 115-foot-tall (35-meter-tall) Vega C debuted in July 2022 and had seven flights under its belt before today, six of them successful.

The rocket was developed by the European Space Agency and originally operated by the France-based company Arianespace. The Italian outfit Avio now runs the vehicle's liftoffs, however; today's launch was the second Avio has managed.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:35 p.m. ET with news of successful liftoff, then again at 1:10 a.m. ET with news of successful satellite deployment.

SpaceX lofted three telecom satellites to orbit today (Sept. 13) on a milestone mission for the company.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT), carrying the final three satellites for Luxembourg-based SES' O3b mPOWER constellation.

It was the 700th mission to date for SpaceX's Falcon rocket family, according to the company. That family first spread its wings in March 2006 when the Falcon 1 debuted. The Falcon 1 flew a total of five times, twice successfully, before giving way to the workhorse Falcon 9 in 2010. The Falcon 9 has conducted the vast majority of the family's flights; the only other member, the still-active Falcon Heavy, has launched 13 times to date.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth a little less than nine minutes after launch today, landing in the Atlantic Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas." It was the 29th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1080.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued hauling the O3b mPOWER trio to medium Earth orbit (MEO). The satellites were deployed as scheduled, being released at an altitude of 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) over a 14-minute span starting roughly 33.5 minutes after launch.

SES already operates 10 O3b mPOWER satellites in MEO. The spacecraft that went up today will complete the constellation, which is "purpose-built to deliver predictable low latency, exceptional throughput and unprecedented flexibility for industries where uptime isn’t optional," according to the company.

"It transforms how networks operate by pairing advanced software defined satellites with an intelligent ground and software ecosystem — ensuring guaranteed performance, even as global bandwidth demands surge," the company wrote.

The O3b mPOWER satellites, which are built by Boeing, weigh about 3,750 pounds (1,700 kilograms) apiece. SpaceX has launched all of them, on six Falcon 9 launches beginning in December 2022.

Today's launch was SpaceX's 107th orbital mission of the year. The Falcon 9 has performed 105 of those flights, with the Falcon Heavy conducting the other two.

SpaceX has also launched two suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket in 2026 and is gearing up for the third, which apparently will take the giant vehicle orbital for the first time.

Rocket Lab still holds out hope that it can build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency picked Blue Origin for that job earlier this month, awarding Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company $700 million to develop, launch and operate the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN).

Today (Sept. 11), however, Rocket Lab announced that it has challenged that decision, filing a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

"NASA's award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria mandated by Congress. In addition, the agency’s punitive review of Rocket Lab's technical volume was inconsistent, making incorrect assertions and conclusions," Rocket Lab said today in an X post that laid out its argument.

"Procurement standards exist to ensure fair competition and protect public investment," the California-based company added. "We are pursuing this review to ensure those standards are upheld for critical infrastructure that will underpin American exploration at Mars for decades to come."

As its name suggests, the MTN orbiter will serve as a communications link between mission controllers here on Earth and other NASA spacecraft studying the Red Planet. Just two agency orbiters fulfill that relay role these days, and both are quite old: Mars Odyssey launched in 2001, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter lifted off in 2005.

NASA had been eyeing a new Mars telecom orbiter for years and finally got Congressional funding for it in July 2025 — $700 million, to be precise. The agency issued a request for proposals this past May, drawing considerable interest from the private sector.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were widely considered the front-runners, and NASA ended up going with Blue. The award calls for the company to deliver MTN (which, despite the "network" in its name, is a single spacecraft) to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028. It's expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

Blue Origin has been in Rocket Lab's shoes before, and has behaved similarly. Bezos' company filed a protest with the GAO in 2021 after NASA picked SpaceX to provide the first crewed moon lander for the agency's Artemis program.

The GAO denied the protest in July of that year. Blue Origin then sued NASA but lost in court in November 2021. The story has a happy ending for the company, however: NASA decided to select a second Artemis lander as well, and Blue Origin won that contract in 2023. We'll see how this story plays out for Rocket Lab...

Rocket Lab just launched a mystery mission to orbit.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Thursday (Sept. 10) at 11:28 p.m. EDT (0328 GMT and 3:28 p.m. local New Zealand time on Sept. 11).

The launched kicked off a mission the company called "Happily Ever Faster," which we know little about.

Rocket Lab did not livestream the mission or reveal who booked it, saying only that it aimed to loft "a single commercial satellite to a 500 km low Earth orbit." That did indeed happen successfully, the company announced via X about 80 minutes after launch.

Speculation has worked to fill the information vacuum, as it generally does. For example, some outside observers think "Happily Ever Faster" carried up a "Gen-3" satellite for the geospatial intelligence company BlackSky.

These spacecraft are powerful Earth observers, capable of resolving features as small as 14 inches (35 centimeters) on our planet's surface. Rocket Lab has launched BlackSky Gen-3 satellites before, so this is a pretty good bet — especially since, in that post-launch X post, the company revealed that the deployed payload was an Earth-observing craft.

"Happily Ever Faster" was Rocket Lab's 16th launch of 2026, and the 13th involving the 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to space.

The company has also launched three missions this year with HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that tests customer equipment in a hypersonic flight environment. All 16 launches in 2026 have been successful.

A pair of private spacecraft just showed off some impressive maneuverability high above Earth.

The two probes — Mira satellites operated by the California startup Impulse Space — zoomed within 650 feet (200 meters) of each other in low Earth orbit (LEO) recently. The rendezvous demonstrated skills that could be useful to a variety of customers down the road, according to the company.

"These types of dynamic, agile maneuvers are how we unlock full access to space after launch and create new mission possibilities," Tom Mueller, CEO and founder of Impulse Space (and, prior to that, the first person Elon Musk ever hired at SpaceX), said in a statement on Tuesday (Sept. 8). "Our teams that design, build and operate Mira are leading the way toward a true space age, and customers across all sectors will be the beneficiaries."

Mira is an orbital transfer vehicle — a spacecraft designed to deliver customer payloads to precise locations in Earth orbit or beyond. The dishwasher-sized Mira can carry up to 660 pounds (300 kilograms) of gear and is highly maneuverable, as the recent rendezvous showed.

The operation involved Mira satellites that launched in January 2025 and November 2025, on missions that Impulse calls LEO Express 2 (LEO-2) and LEO Express 3 (LEO-3), respectively.

The action began this past February, when the LEO-2 Mira conducted a lengthy engine burn to close in on its counterpart. LEO-2 performed additional, smaller burns throughout the spring and summer, coming into orbital alignment with LEO-3.

"Then in July, LEO-2 executed a series of close approaches to LEO-3, starting at about 820 meters [2,690 feet] apart and subsequently moving closer to LEO-3," Impulse Space wrote in the Tuesday update. "Ultimately, for the closest approach, LEO-2 maneuvered to within about 200 meters of LEO-3."

Both Miras chronicled the rendezvous, snapping photos of each other with onboard camera gear. Two other companies, Starfish Space and HEO, worked with Impulse Space to pull off this orbital photo shoot.

Impulse has worked with Starfish before. The duo collaborated late last year on a rendezvous between LEO-2 and the first space-flown Mira, which launched on the Leo Express 1 mission in November 2023.

On that operation, called Remora, LEO 2 used Starfish Space navigation software to get within 4,100 feet (1,250 m) of LEO 1.

"We're showcasing some of the advanced capabilities that set Mira apart from other vehicles," Drew Damon, vice president of spacecraft programs at Impulse, said in Tuesday's statement. "Twice now, we've demonstrated that Mira has the agility and propulsion to support a new class of dynamic operations on orbit, and our team is excited to continue tackling the mission sets Mira is uniquely qualified to handle."

Impulse is not alone in developing and demonstrating orbital maneuverability. Such skills are a key priority of national governments, which want to service and upgrade their own satellites — and keep tabs on the activities of adversary craft. For example, earlier this year, two Russian spacecraft got within a mere 10 feet (3 m) of each other high above Earth.

Frank Culbertson had a birds-eye view of one of the most memorable and tragic events in American history.

The NASA astronaut was the only American off of Earth on Sept. 11, 2001. He was circling the planet aboard the International Space Station (ISS) when terrorists flew commercial jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing more than 2,700 people.

The ISS passed over New York shortly after the attacks took place, so Culbertson saw the devastation from an eerie remove. He shared his thoughts with Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in real time, chronicling the tragedy like no one else could.

"We could see New York City and the smoke from the fires," Culbertson said. "Our prayers and thoughts go out to all the people there and everywhere else here — I'm looking up and down the East Coast to see if I can see anything else — and to the people in Washington."

Terrorists hijacked four commercial planes on 9/11, flying two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Passengers on the fourth plane overpowered the hijackers, forcing it to crash in a field in Pennsylvania rather than hit the terrorists' intended target, which was likely the U.S. Capitol building or the White House.

"I hope that the people responsible are caught and brought to justice as soon as possible," Culbertson added. "But first, our prayers and condolences to all involved. And I just wanted the folks to know that their city still looks very beautiful from space. I know it's very difficult for everybody in America right now, and I know folks are struggling very hard to to deal with this and recover from it. But the country still looks good, and, for New Yorkers, your city still looks great from up here."

Culbertson gave a more complete accounting of his thoughts in an open letter, which he published a day after the attacks.

"The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked," he wrote.

"It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point," Culbertson added. "The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the Earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are."

Culbertson arrived at the ISS on Aug. 12, 2001 aboard the space shuttle Discovery along with cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin. The trio comprised Expedition 3, the third-ever crewed mission to the orbiting lab, which ran through December of that year.

We're now up to Expedition 75, and there have been no breaks: The ISS has been continuously staffed by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000.

Expedition 3 was Culbertson's third and final spaceflight. He retired from NASA in August 2002 and went to work in the private sector. Among other roles, he led human spaceflight efforts at Orbital Sciences Corp., which built the Cygnus ISS resupply spacecraft. Cygnus still flies today, for the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, which bought Orbital Sciences in 2018.

Culbertson, 77, retired from Northrop Grumman in 2018. He currently serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit Space Foundation, among other roles.

You can read more about Culbertson's experiences on NASA's dedicated 9/11 page. That page also outlines how the agency helped emergency managers assess the damage in New York City just after the attacks and discusses some of the ways NASA has honored 9/11 victims and their families over the years.

For example, NASA flew nearly 6,000 small American flags on the STS-108 mission of the space shuttle Endeavour, which launched on Dec. 5, 2001 and landed 12 days later.

"Students working out of Johnson Space Center in Houston assembled commemorative packages that included the space‑flown flags, which were then presented to victims' families," NASA officials wrote about the project. "Distribution began on June 14, 2002 — National Flag Day — during a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York."

SpaceX launched a secret mission for the U.S. Space Force today (Sept. 10) from California's central coast.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 11:42 a.m. EDT (1542 GMT; 8:42 a.m. local time), kicking off a mission called USSF-153.

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You." It was the 27th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1801. The record for a SpaceX rocket is 37, set last month during a launch of the company's Starlink internet satellites.

USSF-153 is a classified mission, so little is known about its payloads — what they are or where exactly they're headed. We didn't get much clarity from the webcast, which ended shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage landed.

However, the location of that touchdown provided some potentially useful information about USSF-153, according to NextSpaceflight.com.

The mission might be carrying "a batch of classified LEO [low Earth orbit] satellites for a U.S. government entity based on SpaceX's Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches," the outlet wrote.

"Starshield leverages SpaceX's Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts," SpaceX wrote in a description of the Starshield program.

Today's launch was the 104th Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Eighty of the rocket's flights this year have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. ET on Sept. 10 with news of successful launch and rocket landing.

Like most of their compatriots here on terra firma, the three Americans living off Earth will get to put their feet up today (Sept. 7).

NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir and Anil Menon will get Labor Day off aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the agency said on Friday (Sept. 4). European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, the first French woman ever to perform a spacewalk, will also be off duty.

However, the three Russian cosmonauts living on the ISS will have to clock in as usual.

The trio — Pyotr Dubrov, Andrey Fedyaev and Anna Kikina — "will be busy monitoring the Progress 94 resupply spacecraft when it undocks on Monday, packed with trash and obsolete gear, from the Poisk module," NASA officials said in an update on Friday.

"It will be replaced by the Progress 96 resupply spacecraft after it launches from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sept. 9 for an automated docking two days later to Poisk’s vacated port," they added.

Adenot, Feyaev, Hathaway and Meir arrived at the ISS in mid-February on SpaceX's Crew-12 mission. Dubrov, Kikina and Menon are relative newcomers, reaching the station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on July 14.

NASA astronauts on long-duration missions to the ISS generally work a relatively normal schedule, getting weekends and major holidays off. Such downtime is crucial to mission success, as it helps the spaceflyers stay happy, healthy and productive.

They may not be able to mark the holidays in exactly the same ways we do here on Earth, however. For example, the astronauts won't be grilling any hamburgers or hot dogs today, as open flames are verboten on the ISS.

As today's schedule shows, international crewmates do not always have the same days off in orbit. But they try to celebrate major holidays like Christmas together, both to cement the bonds that exist between them and to take the sting out of being so far away from family and friends.

SpaceX launched 27 more of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit today (Sept. 6).

The spacecraft rode to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT; 7:26 a.m. local California time). The Falcon 9 rose into blue morning skies — something of a rarity for California's central coast, which is often cloaked in fog.

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

It was the 19th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1088. This marks about the halfway point to the SpaceX record of 37 flights, which was set by B1067 during a Starlink launch on Aug. 25.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, carried the 27 Starlink satellites to LEO, deploying them on schedule 62 minutes after launch.

Today's launch was the 103rd Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Eighty of those flights have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled. It currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

Starlink missions fly exclusively out of Vandenberg these days. SpaceX used to launch them from Florida as well, but the company recently put those missions on hold until it gets its Starship megarocket up and running on the Space Coast.

SpaceX will rely on Starship to launch its next-gen Starlink V3 satellites, which are bigger and more capable than the current V2. The company wants to assemble a network of about 100,000 Starlink V3s in LEO, Elon Musk has said.