SpaceX launched another set of U.S. spy satellites tonight (June 28).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base tonight at 11:14 p.m. EDT (8:14 p.m. local California time; 0314 GMT on June 29).
The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth about 8 minutes after liftoff tonight as planned, landing on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It was the eighth launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.
The NRO, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, called tonight's mission NROL-186. It was the second dedicated to building out the agency's new "proliferated architecture."
This network will consist of "numerous, smaller satellites designed for capability and resilience," the NRO wrote in an NROL-186 mission description. That's a departure from the traditional U.S. spysat strategy, which depends on big, highly capable spacecraft that are expensive and time-consuming to develop and build.
We don't know exactly what the NROL-186 satellites will be doing, or what they're capable of; the NRO releases few details about its spacecraft and their activities. We didn't get to see them deploy, either; SpaceX ended its webcast just after the Falcon 9's landing, at the request of the NRO.
Related: SpaceX launches next-gen US spy satellites and sticks the landing (video)
SpaceX also launched the first "proliferated architecture" batch, on the NROL-146 mission, which lifted off atop a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg on May 22 of this year.
Tonight's launch was the 66th Falcon 9 mission of the year already. Forty-seven of the 2024 launches have been dedicated to building out SpaceX's Starlink broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.
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