Watch SpaceX's Historic Starship Flight 13: Record-Breaking Launch, Landing & First Live Starlink Deployment

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lit up Florida’s predawn sky today as it lofted the CRS-35 Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station (ISS), kicking off the company’s 35th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. The two-stage booster roared off historic Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, generating a triple sonic-boom encore on its return and treating East Coast sky-watchers to the coveted “space jellyfish” plume as sunrise backlit the exhaust. Minutes after liftoff, the veteran first stage touched down on the droneship “A Shortfall of Gravitas,” marking its 13th flight and extending SpaceX’s record cadence of reusable launches. Inside Dragon’s pressurized trunk: 6,300 lb (2,860 kg) of science gear, crew supplies and the final pair of ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSA). Once installed, the new wings will boost the station’s power output by roughly 30 percent, enabling more energy-hungry experiments ranging from climate monitoring to biomedical research. Featured investigations riding uphill include: • A free-flying robotic assistant designed to test autonomous maintenance tasks. • Plant growth chambers that examine how drought-resistant crops respond to microgravity. • An atmospheric entry sensor package destined for a future Mars lander demonstrator. Dragon is set to rendezvous with the ISS in two days, using laser-guided navigation for an autonomous docking to the Harmony module. The station’s seven-person Expedition 71 crew will unload time-critical payloads within hours of hatch opening, kick-starting more than 200 scheduled experiments for the increment. For SpaceX, CRS-35 is just one chapter in a packed manifest that also includes the upcoming fourth Starship test flight from South Texas, a batch of Starlink internet-satellites and the maiden launch of the company’s Falcon 9 “block-6” upgrade aimed at pushing reuse beyond 20 flights. NASA, meanwhile, notes that the final iROSA delivery closes a multiyear effort to augment the ISS power grid ahead of new commercial modules later this decade. How to watch the docking: NASA TV and SpaceX’s webcast will begin coverage roughly 30 minutes before scheduled arrival; viewers can stream the feed on YouTube, the NASA App or X (formerly Twitter). With flawless execution of today’s launch and landing, SpaceX continues to cement its role as the workhorse for low-Earth-orbit logistics—keeping the space station stocked, science flowing and the dream of routine access to orbit very much alive.