Starship isn’t flying alone today.
At least.
A Falcon 9 blasted off from Vandenberg Space ForceBase in California. Just after 4:32 p.m. EDT. Twenty-one satellites headed for space. These aren’t science projects or cell phone boosters for casual users. They are strictly military gear. Part of the Tranche 1 Transport Layer. The US Space Force wants global reach. Encrypted connectivity. Anywhere a warfighter might find themselves.
SpaceX has big plans for the afternoon too.
The megarocket Starship —the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth—waits in South Texas. Its 13th test flight starts in a few hours. A 90-minute window opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT. We will stream it live. Coverage begins a half-hour prior. But for now? The Falcon 9 handles the immediate work.
The Network Builds Fast
This launch is piece number three for this specific satellite layer. York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman built the hardware. The goal? One hundred twenty-six satellites eventually. We are already at sixty-three in orbit.
It goes fast.
SDA uses a spiral development approach, pushing new capability to warfighters every two years. They call these updates “tranches.”
That is how they talk about it. Efficient. Rapid. Proliferated. The official name for the whole thing is the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture. A mouthful. It sounds like a military budget acronym designed to exhaust you. Which it probably was.
Landing Ship
The first stage returned safely.
Landed on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You.” The ocean is calm today apparently. It was booster 1103 flying again. This is its fourth ride. SpaceX is recycling hardware like nobody else.
The upper stage kept moving though. Carrying the twenty-one satellites deeper into Low Earth Orbit.
When do they detach? We don’t actually know. The mission page went quiet. Space.com lost the feed too. The SDA requested it be cut. They probably didn’t want the whole internet seeing exactly where the new assets deployed. Secrecy over spectacle. Sometimes the best parts happen off-camera.
Which makes you wonder? How many more layers will follow this one?
