SpaceX will launch its record-setting 139th mission of the year today (Oct. 23), and you can watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, during a four-hour window that opens at 9:30 p.m. EDT (0130 GMT on Oct. 24).
Today’s launch will loft the second and final satellite for the Spainsat Next Generation (NG) constellation, which will provide “military-grade secure communications to the Spanish Armed Forces and its partners,” according to SatNews.
SpaceX also launched the first Spainsat NG satellite, which lifted off atop a Falcon 9 this past January.
If all goes to plan today, the Falcon 9’s upper stage will deploy the Spainsat NG-2 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit about 36 minutes after liftoff.
The rocket’s first stage, meanwhile, will not come back to Earth for a safe touchdown — a rarity these days for Falcon 9 missions. The booster is in expendable mode today “due to the additional performance required to deliver this payload to orbit,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description.
This mission will be the 22nd for this booster, the company added.
Today’s launch will be the 139th of 2025 for SpaceX, setting a new mark for the company. So far this year, SpaceX has conducted 133 Falcon 9 missions — also a record — and five suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket.
In 2024, SpaceX performed 132 Falcon 9 flights, four Starship test launches and two liftoffs of its powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.
