SpaceX successfully launched 23 satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base early Sunday morning, with the Falcon 9 first stage touching down cleanly on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. The mission, designated Starlink Group 17-43, carried 21 standard Starlink broadband satellites alongside two Starshield satellites — the government-oriented variant of Starlink designed for national security applications.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) occurred at 9:24:45 p.m. PDT on June 6 — 04:24:45 UTC on June 7. The booster flying this mission, B1097, was on its tenth flight, a milestone that continues to demonstrate the cadence and reliability SpaceX has built into its reusability program. After stage separation, B1097 made a successful propulsive landing on the autonomous spaceport drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, stationed in the Pacific Ocean.
The inclusion of two Starshield satellites alongside the standard Starlink batch is consistent with SpaceX's growing role as a defense contractor. Starshield uses the same underlying hardware platform as Starlink but is purpose-built for government and military use cases, with enhanced security features and inter-satellite link capabilities. B1097's tenth successful flight adds to the growing list of Falcon 9 boosters that have crossed the double-digit reuse mark — a threshold that would have seemed ambitious just a few years ago and now reads as routine. For more on SpaceX's launch cadence and constellation progress, see our SpaceX coverage.
Sources & reporting notes
The links below identify the material source records used for this report.
- @NASASpaceflight on X (2026-06-07T04:33:36.000Z) — Direct source
- @NASASpaceflight on X (2026-06-07T04:25:38.000Z) — Direct source
- @SpaceX on X (2026-06-07T04:14:23.000Z) — Direct source
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