Falcon 9 Lifts Off at Dusk With 27 Starlink Satellites From Vandenberg
The Starlink 15-25 mission left Space Launch Complex 4-East at 5:28 p.m. Monday. Its booster, flying for the 20th time, landed on a drone ship in the Pacific, and a classified Space Force mission follows Thursday.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday evening, sending 27 Starlink internet satellites toward orbit in the first Starlink mission from the West Coast since Sept. 19. Liftoff of the Starlink 15-25 mission from Space Launch Complex 4-East came at 5:28 p.m. PDT, inside the four-hour window SpaceX had set for the flight, Spaceflight Now reported.
The rocket flew a southerly path along the California coast toward an orbit inclined 70 degrees to the equator. The 27 satellites, of the Starlink V2 Mini Optimized design, were deployed into an orbit about 266 kilometers high a little more than an hour after liftoff, with SpaceX reporting deployment about 62 minutes into the flight.
The first-stage booster, serial number B1088, was flying for the 20th time. It separated and landed on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean nearly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster had previously flown the NROL-126, Transporter-12, SPHEREx, NROL-57 and USSF-366 missions, along with 14 earlier Starlink delivery runs, according to Spaceflight Now.
Monday's flight was the 69th rocket launch of 2026 from Vandenberg, the Ventura County Star reported, putting the base on pace to pass the 71 launches it recorded in 2025. The Starlink mission also closed a busy three days at the base: on Saturday, a Falcon 9 from the same pad carried 21 data transport satellites for the Space Development Agency into orbit.
The pad stays busy this week. SpaceX is next scheduled to fly USSF-481, a classified satellite deployment mission for the U.S. Space Force, from Space Launch Complex 4-East on Thursday, with a launch window from 4:44 to 8:44 p.m. PT, according to the Star's weekly schedule. The booster on that flight is also set to land on the drone ship in the Pacific.
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