Orbital Daily Tracker: A quiet Monday — then five launches in three days and Skyroot's Vikram-1 finally gets its window
A quiet Monday is the rarest of treats, and worth using well. There are no orbital launches on the schedule today. The cadence resumes at 01:16 a.m. Pacific tomorrow with a Falcon 9 Starlink out of Vandenberg, and from there it does not let up for seventy-two hours: two Starlinks, a Soyuz crew swap, an SDA tranche, and Starship V3's second flight. Then, somewhere inside a window that opened yesterday and runs through August 4, Skyroot Aerospace will try to fly Vikram-1 — India's first privately developed orbital rocket, a four-stage solid-and-liquid vehicle from a company valued at $1.1 billion, and a test that, if it succeeds, will redraw the geography of commercial launch.
This is the kind of week where the launch cadence tells you more about the industry than any individual mission does.
Today's launches
No orbital launches are scheduled for Monday, July 13, 2026. The next launch is Falcon 9 Starlink Group 15-14 from VSFB SLC-4E, currently set for 01:16 a.m. PDT (08:16 UTC) on Tuesday, July 14.
Source: RocketLaunch.Live launch schedule (refreshed July 13, 15:35 UTC); Space Launch Now upcoming feed.
Yesterday's recap (July 12)
Sunday was a quiet orbital day — the only news in the launch domain was the publication of our Weekly Read on reusability's structural pivot, anchored by the Long March 10B's net-catch on Friday morning out of Wenchang. No orbital launches occurred on July 12 worldwide. The previous orbital launch before that was Falcon 9 Starlink Group 17-48 from Vandenberg on July 11 (24 sats, 02:55:57 UTC); the launch before that was Long March 10B on July 10.
Source: RocketLaunch.Live "Recent Launches" feed; Wikipedia "List of spaceflight launches in July–September 2026" Q3 2026 table.
The cadence lull is real, and it is the right time to look ahead.
This week's watch
| Date / Time (UTC) | Vehicle | Mission | Site | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 14, 08:16 | Falcon 9 Block 5 (B1093) | Starlink Group 15-14 | VSFB SLC-4E | 24-sat SSO shell, Vandenberg cadence |
| Jul 14, 11:15 | Falcon 9 Block 5 (B1080) | Starlink Group 10-45 | CCSFS SLC-40 | 29-sat mid-inclination, Cape cadence |
| Jul 14, 18:47 | Soyuz-2.1a | Soyuz MS-29 (crewed) | Baikonur LC-31/6 | ISS Expedition 75: Dubrov, Kikina, Menon |
| Jul 17, 00:22 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Tranche 1 Transport Layer E | VSFB SLC-4E | SDA TTL — constellation buildout |
| Jul 17, 03:45 | Starship V3 (B20, S40) | Flight 13 (suborbital) | Starbase, Boca Chica | Second flight of Starship V3; catch attempt expected |
| Jul 12 – Aug 4 (NET) | Vikram-1 | Maiden test flight | Satish Dhawan SLP | Skyroot Aerospace; India's first private orbital rocket |
Sources: RocketLaunch.Live upcoming feed; Space Launch Now; Wikipedia Q3 2026 launch list; NextSpaceflight mission pages; Skyroot Aerospace press release (July 2, 2026) on the Vikram-1 window opening.
Two I'd set reminders for. Soyuz MS-29 on July 14 is the second seat-swap rotation to put a NASA astronaut on a Russian crew vehicle in 2026 — Anil Menon joins Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina for Expedition 75. The political floor of US-Russia civil-space cooperation is the quietest piece of cross-agency news in two years, and each successful rotation reinforces it. Starship Flight 13 on July 17 is the second flight of the V3 vehicle — Booster 20 and Ship 40, both through cryogenic proof testing and the 60-second static fire on July 1. The "second flight" frame is the one that matters for cadence: it is what turns the V3 program from a single-data-point program into a flight-rate program.
News synthesis
Vikram-1's window is the story of the week. Skyroot Aerospace's $1.1 billion-valuation maiden test flight is scheduled no earlier than July 12 from Satish Dhawan, and the window runs through August 4. The vehicle is a four-stage orbital launch vehicle approximately 20 meters tall and 1.7 meters in diameter — the first three stages use solid propulsion, the upper kick stage uses liquid propulsion for orbital insertion and trim burns. The carbon-composite airframe is structural-mass-reduced; the vehicle also uses 3D-printed components. If Vikram-1 reaches orbit, India joins a small club of nations whose private sector can deliver payloads to LEO on its own, and the commercial-launch options for small-satellite operators broaden by exactly one more credible second-stage-independent provider. If it does not, the failure modes matter too — two consecutive ISRO launch failures in the spring framed the moment Skyroot stepped into.
The Long March 10B ripple is still settling. Three days after the Friday reusability landmark, the architecture choices are getting the deeper treatment they were always going to get. The four-phase walkthrough in Global Times' ground reporting (linked in yesterday's Weekly Read) makes the engineering bet explicit: the Linghangzhe chose net-catch over landing legs for reasons that have to do with propellant-settling margins and the 144-meter platform's DP2 dynamic positioning. The American reusable program went one way; the Chinese reusable program chose differently. The next decade's space journalism is going to be about which architecture wins at fleet scale, not whether reusability works. (Source: Global Times, Xinhua, China Daily ground reporting on July 10, 2026.)
Crew rotations are doing the diplomatic work that the headlines do not. The Soyuz MS-29 seat-swap agreement that puts Anil Menon on a Russian vehicle for Expedition 75 is a small, technical, and durable thing. It is also the kind of cooperation that survives the news cycle because it depends on engineering interfaces, not political statements. With ISS handover planning underway for the post-2030 commercial-LEO destinations, the seat-swap mechanism is the precedent the next decade of human-spaceflight diplomacy will run on. (Source: Wikipedia Expedition 75 crew manifest; Roscosmos mission page.)
If you want a single book that frames the next decade the way the Long March 10B story frames this one, The Space Economy by Chad Anderson (founder of Space Capital, published 2024 by Wiley) is the closest thing to a ten-year map of the commercial-launch, satellite-broadband, and lunar-services economy. It is bullish but it cites its numbers, and the prediction matrix on launch-cost-per-kilogram has aged well over the last eighteen months. Worth the weekend.
The week ahead is dense, the launch cadence is back, and the long-running structural story is the one the launches are about — not the one they are. That is the part to keep watching.
— Atlas Renner, Editor in Chief, SpaceOrbitals
Sources
- RocketLaunch.Live launch schedule, refreshed 13 July 2026 15:35 UTC — https://www.rocketlaunch.live
- Space Launch Now upcoming feed — https://spacelaunchnow.me/launch/upcoming/
- Wikipedia, "List of spaceflight launches in July–September 2026" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_in_July%E2%80%93September_2026
- Skyroot Aerospace press release, Vikram-1 window opening, 2 July 2026 — https://www.skyroot.in
- Eastern Herald, "Skyroot's Vikram-1 Targets India's First Private Orbital Launch," 5 July 2026 — https://easternherald.com/2026/07/05/skyroot-vikram-1-india-first-private-orbital-launch/
- Space.com, "Getting Vikram-1 to orbit: Inside Skyroot Aerospace's coming bid to make spaceflight history" — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/getting-vikram-1-to-orbit-inside-skyroot-aerospaces-coming-bid-to-make-spaceflight-history
- Wikipedia, Vikram-I — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikram-I
- Wikipedia, 2026 in spaceflight — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_spaceflight
- Global Times, Long March 10B ground reporting, 10 July 2026 — https://www.globaltimes.cn
- Xinhua, "China's Long March-10B rocket makes maiden flight," 10 July 2026 — https://www.news.cn