Latest Developments

SpaceX’s veteran booster B1067 etched its name further into rocketry history today, launching the Starlink 10-42 mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Pad 40 for a record-breaking 36th time — the most flights ever logged by a single orbital-class rocket booster. The mission continues the relentless cadence of Starlink constellation-building, with 12,443 satellites launched to date, 10,759 currently in orbit, and 10,743 confirmed operational. Meanwhile, Japanese lunar company ispace announced a landmark commercial agreement to fly up to 1,100 pounds of payload to the Moon aboard a future SpaceX Starship mission, signaling growing confidence in Starship as a serious cargo platform beyond Earth orbit. On the consumer side, a new Starlink direct-to-cell pet tracker from Fi has begun reaching customers, offering a glimpse at how the constellation’s DTC capability is quietly reshaping everyday connectivity products.

Space Safety

The current Starlink conjunction threat picture reveals two HIGH-risk events concentrated in early July 2026, both involving STARLINK-4621 and the non-operational SL-18 R/B debris object with a minimum range of 0.011 km and collision probability of 1.0 on Jul 9, 23:44 UTC. Six additional MODERATE-risk conjunctions are distributed across the constellation through mid-July, primarily involving partially operational Starlink satellites, while ten LOW-risk events complete the assessment. Concurrently, six Starlink satellites are predicted to reenter between Jul 8-12, 2026, with decay windows ranging from 1 to 1,140 minutes, indicating a period of elevated debris generation risk requiring active monitoring.

Detailed Coverage

B1067 Shatters Its Own Record With a 36th Falcon 9 Flight

Booster B1067 launched the Starlink 10-42 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:25 a.m. EDT (09:25 UTC) on July 9, setting an unprecedented milestone as the first orbital-class rocket booster ever to complete 36 flights. The achievement underscores the extraordinary durability of SpaceX’s reusable hardware and the aggressive turnaround cadence the company has refined over years of iterative inspection and refurbishment. For satellite trackers, this mission adds another batch of Starlink V2 Mini satellites to an already sprawling low Earth orbit constellation, with objects from the 10-42 deployment expected to appear in tracking catalogs within hours of deployment confirmation.

Read the full story: Spaceflight Now

Watch History: Falcon 9 Booster Makes Its Record 36th Launch

Space.com provided live coverage and viewer guidance for the record attempt, noting that the milestone is a landmark not just for SpaceX but for the commercial launch industry broadly. The reuse of a single booster 36 times compresses the per-launch cost curve dramatically, a factor that directly enables the economic model behind the Starlink mega-constellation. Observers tracking B1067’s catalog history will note that the booster has now delivered payloads spanning Starlink batches, NASA crewed missions, and commercial satellite deployments across its career — a flight record that once seemed impossible for expendable-era engineers.

Read the full story: Space.com

ispace Books 500 kg of Starship Cargo for Future Lunar Mission

Japanese lunar exploration company ispace has formally contracted approximately 1,100 pounds (roughly 500 kilograms) of payload capacity aboard a future SpaceX Starship lunar lander mission, according to SpaceNews. The deal represents a significant commercial validation of Starship’s lunar cargo architecture and expands ispace’s moon program beyond the smaller payload envelopes available on its own Series 2 lander. The agreement reflects a broader industry trend of commercial lunar customers hedging across multiple vehicle types to ensure delivery flexibility as NASA’s Artemis timeline continues to evolve.

The scale of the booking — half a metric ton — illustrates why Starship’s volumetric and mass margins are attracting customers that simply cannot fit their ambitions onto smaller landers. ispace, which survived the crash of its Mission 1 attempt in 2023 and is pressing forward with subsequent missions, appears to be positioning Starship as a complement rather than a replacement to its own vehicles for payloads that demand greater capacity.

Read the full story: SpaceNews

Space.com: ispace’s 1,100-Pound Starship Bet Signals Maturing Lunar Market

Space.com offered additional context on the ispace-Starship commercial agreement, framing it within the company’s broader ambitions to become a recurring lunar logistics provider. The outlet noted that the cargo volume booked would be physically impossible to accommodate on most current or near-term commercial lunar landers, making Starship’s cavernous payload bay effectively the only near-term option for this class of lunar delivery. The deal is also a commercial endorsement of SpaceX’s still-maturing Starship program at a moment when the vehicle has yet to complete a fully successful end-to-end demonstration mission.

Read the full story: Space.com

Fi Ultra Pet Tracker Brings Starlink Direct-to-Cell to the Consumer Market

The Verge published a hands-on review of the Fi Ultra, the first commercially available pet tracker to integrate T-Mobile’s T-Satellite direct-to-cell service — a capability powered by SpaceX’s Starlink constellation operating in DTC mode. The device automatically fails over from standard LTE to Starlink satellite connectivity when a dog ventures beyond cellular coverage, allowing owners to track pets virtually anywhere in the United States. At $199, the Fi Ultra represents one of the earliest mass-market consumer products to monetize Starlink’s direct-to-cell infrastructure, a use case SpaceX has been building toward since the DTC partnership with T-Mobile was announced.

The review flagged a meaningful trade-off: battery life suffers noticeably compared to GPS-and-LTE-only trackers, a penalty consistent with the higher power demands of satellite link acquisition. Nevertheless, the product’s real-world performance — recovering a dog’s location in a cellular dead zone where LTE failed entirely — validates the practical utility of DTC coverage for edge-case scenarios. From a constellation perspective, each DTC connection routes through Starlink’s growing LEO network, adding a new category of non-communications-terminal ground user to the system’s service profile.

Read the full story: The Verge

Constellation Status

There have been no changes to the Starlink constellation since the last check. The constellation currently consists of 12,443 total launched satellites, with 10,759 remaining in orbit, 10,743 of which are operational, while 1,684 have decayed from their orbits.

• Total Launched: 12443
• Total On Orbit: 10759
• Total Working: 10743

Track Starlink satellites in real-time: Track Starlink