<\/p>\n You can watch it live via a SpaceX webcast<\/a>, which is expected to begin about 10 minutes before launch.<\/p>\n This evening’s launch will kick off the USSF-481 mission, which will deliver mysterious payloads to an undisclosed location in the final frontier.<\/p>\n Don’t expect SpaceX<\/a> to provide more info during the webcast. It will probably end just after the Falcon 9 first stage’s landing, which is expected to occur about eight minutes after launch on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You,” which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n USSF-481 will be the 28th flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1081. Sixteen of its previous 27 launches were devoted to building out SpaceX’s Starlink<\/a> broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit<\/a>, according to a SpaceX mission description<\/a>.<\/p>\n Previous Booster 1081 missions<\/p>\n USSF-481 will be the 114th Falcon 9 mission of the year. The vast majority of the rocket’s flights in 2026 \u2014 more than 70% of them \u2014 have been Starlink missions.<\/p>\n SpaceX has also launched its Falcon Heavy<\/a> and Starship rockets three times so far this year. Falcon Heavy is an operational vehicle, but the fully reusable Starship<\/a> remains in the test-flight phase. It reached orbit for the first time on its most recent launch, which occurred on Sept. 28<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX will launch a classified mission for the U.S. Space Force this evening (Oct. 15), and you can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-631711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net\/flexiimages\/dpnbewsyjn1783958986.svg\")
<\/p>\n