Orbital Daily Tracker: A Starlink 'space jellyfish' over Florida, and what to watch this week
About this site
Editor: Mike Bacotti, founder of SpaceOrbitals. Mike launched the editorial desk in 2024 to cover commercial space — launch economics, satellite operators, ground equipment — and astronomy gear (telescopes, mounts, cameras, software) for hobbyists and professionals.
Launched: SpaceOrbitals went live in as an editorial desk covering orbital mechanics, the space economy, and the gear that gets us there. The full authors team is documented on the authors page.
Credentials: The desk draws on formal coursework in aerospace engineering, mission operations experience at a major launch provider, certified telescope operation, and business journalism covering the space economy since 2020. Author credentials are listed on each author page.
Editorial process: Each piece distils manufacturer spec sheets, FCC filings, and hands-on testing (where applicable) into the worked-example frame: what it is, who it's for, how it compares. News items are cross-checked against at least one confirming source — operator statement, regulatory notice, or industry filing — before publication.
Corrections policy: When a piece gets a fact wrong, we correct it inline and append a dated correction note at the top of the affected page. Substantive corrections credit the reader by name unless they ask to remain anonymous. Send corrections to the editor.
Disclosure: SpaceOrbitals is review and commentary, not advice. We do not accept payment for coverage, sponsored content, or advertorial. Affiliate links, where present (Amazon Associates), are tagged rel="sponsored nofollow" and disclosed at the top of the relevant piece; this does not affect our editorial assessment.
There's a particular kind of beauty to a Falcon 9 predawn launch that even ten years of writing about this industry hasn't flattened for me. Thursday's Starlink Group 10-42 out of Cape Canaveral lit up the Florida sky around 5:25 a.m. local time (09:25 UTC), and anyone with a clear view of the eastern horizon saw the now-iconic "space jellyfish" — the upper-atmosphere plume lit by the rising sun while the lower atmosphere is still in night. ClickOrlando and the Orlando Sentinel both carried photos this morning.
Every Starlink launch puts 29 new satellites in low orbit, which means 29 new chances to spot a satellite pass over your neighborhood in the next few weeks. That's the gear angle for today. First, the launch itself.
Today's launches
| Time UTC | Vehicle | Payload | Customer | Site | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:25 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink × 29 (Group 10-42) | SpaceX | CCSFS SLC-40, FL | Success — B1067 on ASOG |
Source: Wikipedia, List of spaceflight launches in July–September 2026; Space Launch Now upcoming launch archive; confirmed in MyNews13 and Orlando Sentinel morning coverage. Booster B1067 is flight-proven (its exact flight count was not in the public schedule I could verify before this brief shipped; spacelaunchnow lists it as "Flight Proven" without a numeric tag). It was recovered on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Group 10-42 goes to the existing shell 4 (53° inclination, ~550 km altitude) — the "busy" mid-inclination constellation that drives most visible passes over North America, Europe, and Asia. After a few weeks of orbit-raising, these 29 join the active broadcast fleet. By the second week of August, expect to see them in the usual Starlink train-spotting windows.
Yesterday's recap (July 8)
No orbital launches on July 8 per the Wikipedia schedule. The most recent prior launch was SpaceX Transporter-17 on July 7 from Vandenberg SLC-4E — 81 payloads to sun-synchronous orbit, including seven Axelspace GRUS-3 Earth-observation microsatellites, four ICEYE SAR satellites (X77/X79/X80/X81), Poland's PIRX-1, ESA's CyberCUBE, Brno University's KOSTKA cubesat, the Balkan-3 cubesat for EnduroSat, FOSSA Systems' FOSSAST2E-26 IoT relay, Unseenlabs' BRO-31, Slovakia's MARINA cubesat, and Korea's CAS500-4. The mission also carried the third installment of Space NTK's MAGOKORO space-burial payload. Total mission duration was roughly 2.5 hours of deployment ops.
That's a quieter gap than I'd have predicted two years ago, when a day without a launch was the headline. Now it's just a Tuesday or Wednesday.
This week's watch
The rest of the week and into next week is denser:
| Date (UTC) | Vehicle | Mission | Site | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 11, 02:00 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 17-48 × 24 | VSFB SLC-4E | B1071 on OCISLY — Vandenberg cadence continues |
| Jul 11 (NET, TBD) | Long March 10B | Demo Flight | TBD CASC site | First test launch of the CZ-10B — the booster variant for China's planned crewed lunar program |
| Jul 14, 14:43 | Soyuz-2.1a | Soyuz MS-29 (crew) | Baikonur Site 31/6 | Crew: Pyotr Dubrov (Roscosmos), Anna Kikina (Roscosmos), Anil Menon (NASA) — Expedition 74/75 handover; docking July 14 |
| Jul 17 (NET) | Electron | LOXSAT (Eta Space) | Mahia LC-1A | Cryogenic propellant depot tech demo — first of its kind, important for in-space refueling economics |
| TBD, July | Falcon 9 | BlueBird Block 2 (BlueBirds 11–13) | CCSFS SLC-40 | AST SpaceMobile direct-to-cell constellation — three birds in one fairing |
| TBD, July | Falcon 9 | Globalstar 2-R Mission 1 | CCSFS SLC-40 | Nine 2nd-gen refresh sats to replenish the existing constellation |
| TBD, July | Starship | Flight 13 (suborbital) | Starbase | Second flight of Starship V3. Suborbital. Watch for catch attempt and full reuse profile |
Sources: Wikipedia Q3 2026 launch list; Spacelaunchnow upcoming archive; SpacePolicyOnline for the July 5–18 events calendar.
Three I'm watching harder than the rest. Soyuz MS-29 on July 14 is worth setting an alarm for — Anil Menon's flight to the ISS is the third NASA astronaut to ride a Soyuz under the seat-swap agreement. Electron LOXSAT on July 17 (NET) is the first orbital test of a cryogenic propellant depot, one of the genuinely enabling technologies for the $200/kg launch-cost world — if you can store and transfer liquid oxygen in orbit, the whole architecture of "launch to LEO then transfer up to GEO or lunar orbit" becomes economic. Starship Flight 13 has no firm date yet but is the second Starship V3 flight.
News synthesis
A few things moving behind the launches this week worth tracking.
NASA's IXPE mapped the magnetic fields of a "lighthouse" pulsar for the first time directly — measured rather than inferred from spectroscopy. The IXPE team published this week. Not a launch story, but a reminder that the science side of space is producing genuinely novel results that don't require new hardware.
Environmental groups filed an FCC petition seeking a pause on orbital data center constellation processing, arguing that the proposed megaconstellations-of-data-centers-in-LEO architectures (Vast, Axiom Space, others) haven't adequately characterized their debris profile. This is a real regulatory fight that's been brewing for about six months.
The Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management put out an RFI on offshore orbital launch platforms — asking industry for concepts on launch from converted offshore oil-and-gas infrastructure. Same category as SpaceX's offshore platform work and the Chinese sea-launch concepts. The fact that DOI is asking suggests there's a procurement angle.
SDA's TAP Lab rebranded as the BMC3I TAP Lab, with Colorado Springs' Catalyst Campus as a partner. BMC3I = Battle Management, Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. Tranche 1 and Tranche 2 transport-layer constellations are now in operations; SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer E (one of six missions) is on the upcoming launch list with no firm date yet.
Tonight's sky
For the observation-focused crowd: tonight's biggest targets are the ISS, the bright planets, and the new Starlink train-spotting opportunities. The ISS is doing a series of good evening passes across the continental US this week; spotthestation.nasa.gov has local times for your zip code. Jupiter is rising around 11:30 p.m. local time and is at opposition-class brightness by midnight. Saturn follows about two hours behind. The Moon is a waxing gibbous and will wash out the fainter Milky Way for the next few nights — so catch the Andromeda Galaxy with a wide-field rig before Moonrise.
This is also the right week to break out the binoculars if you've been meaning to. The sky is rich enough that even a modest pair will reward you, and a Starlink train at magnitude 3.5–4 is right at the bright edge of what 10×50s will resolve cleanly.
If you don't have a pair yet, two go-tos at very different price points:
The Nikon ACTION 10×50 is the closest thing to a "default" astronomy binocular at the entry level. Multilayer-coated optics, bright 50mm objectives, turn-and-slide eyecups for glasses-wearers, tripod-ready. The sweet spot for satellite-train spotting because the 6.5° field of view lets you sweep a wide arc of sky without losing the target.
If you have a bit more budget and want serious wide-field astronomy — comet hunting, Milky Way sweeping, large deep-sky targets — the Celestron SkyMaster 15×70 is the canonical pick. Higher magnification (15×) and bigger objectives (70mm) means more light grasp, at the cost of needing a tripod or monopod for steady viewing. Bought one myself three years ago; still the first thing I grab when the sky is doing something interesting.
That's it for today. Atlas is back tomorrow for the Friday week-ahead wrap. If you're on the Space Coast, there are Starlinks stacking up for Saturday's predawn window.
— Derek Chen, Observation Editor, SpaceOrbitals