It was the 99th Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, and the 100th Falcon mission of 2026 overall. The other flight was performed by a Falcon Heavy, which lofted the telecom satellite Viasat-3 F3<\/a> in April.<\/p>\n \n A stack of 27 SpaceX Starlink satellites are seen aboard the upper stage of their Falcon 9 rocket before deployment on Aug. 22, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)<\/p>\n Hitting the century mark at this point in the year is impressive. But SpaceX has a ways to go to equal its single-year Falcon launch record of 165<\/a>, which was set in 2025. All of those were Falcon 9 missions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Falcon 9’s first stage came back to Earth<\/a> today as planned. It touched down about 8.5 minutes after launch in the Pacific Ocean, atop the SpaceX<\/a> droneship “Of Course I Still Love You.” It was the ninth flight for this particular booster, which carries the designation B1100.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The 27 Starlink satellites, meanwhile, kept traveling to low Earth orbit<\/a> aboard the Falcon 9’s upper stage, deploying on schedule just under 62 minutes after launch.<\/p>\n Today’s launch makes the largest-ever satellite constellation even bigger: Starlink already consists of more than 11,000<\/a> operational spacecraft.<\/p>\n Previous Booster B1100 launches<\/p>\n NROL-105<\/a> | 7 Starlink missions<\/p>\n As you might expect, Starlink satellites are SpaceX’s most common payload; 76 of this year’s 99 Falcon 9 flights have been dedicated Starlink missions.<\/p>\n And the number of SpaceX satellites is expected to rise considerably in the coming years. The company has said it wants to launch 100,000 of its next-gen Starlink V3<\/a> satellites and operate a constellation of one million data centers<\/a> in Earth orbit. These spacecraft will fly atop SpaceX’s Starship<\/a> megarocket, which remains in development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink internet satellites this morning (Aug. 22) on a milestone mission for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-601277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/p7KZrawCQ7PwRZSm3QGzkY.jpg\")
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