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SpaceX launching 2nd classified mission for US Space Force in less than a week tonight: Watch it live
Liftoff is scheduled for 9 p.m. ET tonight (Sept. 15).
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SpaceX will launch its second classified mission for the U.S. Space Force in less than a week tonight (Sept. 15), and you can watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today, during a four-hour window that opens at 9 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. local California time; 0100 GMT on Sept. 16).
You can watch it live via SpaceX beginning about 10 minutes before launch.
We don't know much about tonight's mission, which is called USSF-259. And we're unlikely to learn much from the webcast, which is expected to end shortly after the Falcon 9's first stage returns to Earth for its drone-ship landing about 8.5 minutes after launch.
That touchdown will be the 13th for this particular booster, which is designated 1097. One of the booster's recent landings was a big milestone for SpaceX. This past April, B1097 pulled off SpaceX's 600th touchdown of an orbital-class rocket, during a launch that sent 25 of the company's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit.
Tonight's mission will be the second that SpaceX flies for the U.S. Space Force in a five-day span: A Falcon 9 launched the similarly classified USSF-153 from Vandenberg on Sept. 10.
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Tonight's launch will be SpaceX's 110th of 2026. The vast majority of the company's flights so far this year — 105 of them, in fact — have been performed by the workhorse Falcon 9.