SpaceX will launch the latest batch of spy satellites for the U.S. government early Friday morning (June 19), and you can watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Friday, during a 35-minute window that opens at 4:40 a.m. EDT (0840 GMT; 1:40 a.m. local California time).
The launch will kick off a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-179. You can watch it live via SpaceX beginning about 10 minutes before liftoff.
The NRO operates the United States’ fleet of spy satellites. NROL-179 will be the 14th mission dedicated to building out a new part of that fleet — a network the NRO calls its “proliferated architecture.”
“To stay ahead of the competition and ensure it can continue to operate in a heightened threat environment, the NRO is modernizing its architecture in space and on the ground — delivering more capability faster with increased resilience,” agency officials wrote in the NROL-179 press kit.
“A greater number of satellites — large and small, government and commercial, in multiple orbits — will deliver an order of magnitude more signals and images than is available today,” they added.
SpaceX and Northrop Grumman build the “proliferated architecture” satellites. Information about the spacecraft is hard to come by; the NRO has not released details about their activities or orbits.
All of these satellites have reached orbit atop Falcon 9s flying out of Vandenberg, on California’s central coast, with the first such mission launching in May 2024.
If everything goes to plan on Friday, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth a little less than eight minutes after liftoff, touching down at Vandenberg’s Landing Zone 4. It will be the third flight for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.
SpaceX’s launch livestream will end shortly after that, at the request of the NRO.
NROL-179 will be the the 71st Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Fifty-seven of the rocket’s 70 launches this year to date have been devoted to building out SpaceX’s Starlink broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.