SpaceX Starlink cadence, NASA Crew-13, and Roman Space Telescope: the week ahead

This is the week the fall launch cadence actually begins. August was busy — SpaceX hit its 100th orbital mission of the year on August 21, LandSpace became the first Chinese company to land an orbital-class booster on August 19, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is sitting on a Florida pad right now, targeting a Falcon Heavy launch on Sunday, September 1 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 UTC). But the stretch from here to mid-September has more structural variety than August did: two Starlink missions from Vandenberg, a crewed NASA Dragon docking with the ISS, and a Vega-C mission from French Guiana carrying Earth-observation and science payloads. The week's through-line is not volume — it is the range of mission types on the calendar simultaneously.

This Week's Launch Schedule

(Sources: Spaceflight Now Launch Schedule, Spaceflight Now — Roman Space Telescope)

Three things worth sitting with before the week starts.

First: the Roman Space Telescope launch on Sunday. If it flies as scheduled, this is the most significant mission of the week by a significant margin. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — formerly WFIRST, renamed in 2020 for NASA's first female chief astronomer — carries a 2.4-meter mirror donated by the National Reconnaissance Office. It is Hubble-class aperture at roughly one-fortieth the cost of Hubble's development, and its primary instrument is a wide-field survey camera that will map roughly 15,000 square degrees of sky over its five-year primary mission. The science program includes dark energy characterization, exoplanet detection via microlensing, and infrared survey work that will complement James Webb's deeper but narrower field of view. A successful launch on Sunday puts it on a path to its operational orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point, with first science images expected within roughly 100 days of launch.

Second: Crew-13 is a milestone for NASA's commercial crew program. Jessica Watkins, commanding on her second Dragon flight, will become the first active NASA astronaut to fly twice on a commercial crew vehicle. She flew as a mission specialist on Crew-7 in August 2023 and spent roughly six months aboard the ISS. This time she commands. She is joined by Luke Delaney (NASA pilot, former Naval aviator and test pilot who has been in the NASA astronaut corps since 2017), Joshua Kutryk (CSA mission specialist, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel who flew CF-18 fighters before joining the Canadian Space Agency), and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos cosmonaut). The crew mix reflects the operational reality of commercial crew: even as NASA astronauts fly primarily, international partners fly the remaining seats under the Intergovernmental Agreement framework that governs ISS crew allocation.

The Crew-13 mission is scheduled for a September 12 launch from Cape Canaveral, with the booster — B1101 — landing at Landing Zone 40 adjacent to the pad. This is the third flight for B1101, making it a relatively fresh booster in the fleet compared to the heavily flown B1063 (35th flight) and B1088 (19th flight) on this week's Starlink missions. The LZ-40 return mode — rather than a droneship landing at sea — reflects the crew-certified booster configuration, which is designed to return to a land pad when winds and sea state would otherwise preclude a ship-based landing.

Third: the Vandenberg Starlink cadence is holding at two per week. The September 2 (Starlink 15-23) and September 5 (Starlink 15-24) missions both fly from Vandenberg SLC-4E on the West Coast. B1063 on the first mission has 35 flights behind it — one of the most experienced boosters in the SpaceX fleet. B1088 on the second has 19 flights. These are not news. They are infrastructure. That is the point: Starlink deployment is no longer a story. It is a schedule. The broader economic context for why this matters — and how megaconstellations are reshaping low Earth orbit's commercial structure — is covered in our LEO economy explainer.

The Spaceflight Now launch schedule tracks confirmed mission windows and updates when delays occur. For Crew-13 and Vega-C, NET dates carry more uncertainty than the Falcon 9 Starlink flights, which tend to hold their windows even when individual missions scrub.

What to Watch This Week

Sunday, September 1 — Falcon Heavy, Kennedy Space Center: The Roman Space Telescope launch is the week's most consequential event. Liftoff at 7:26 a.m. EDT. Watch window is approximately two hours. If it flies on schedule, it will be the 11th Falcon Heavy mission and the first since the Europa Clipper launch in October 2024. The booster landings will occur downrange; the central core is expendable on this mission given the energy required to send the telescope to L2.

Monday, September 2 — Falcon 9, Vandenberg: Starlink 15-23 at 3:46 a.m. EDT. Early morning West Coast launches are typically visible from the Los Angeles basin and points north. The window is narrow. B1063's 35th flight adds to an already remarkable reuse record.

Thursday, September 5 — Falcon 9, Vandenberg: Starlink 15-24 at 7:13 a.m. EDT. The morning window from Vandenberg offers better viewing conditions than overnight windows — daylight launch, clearer air, visible track northward along the California coast.

Friday, September 12 — Falcon 9, Cape Canaveral: NASA Crew-13. The full countdown and launch is worth watching for the crewed aspect and the landing at LZ-40 — adjacent to the pad rather than on a droneship, which is now the preferred return mode for crew-certified boosters.

Mid-September — Vega-C, Kourou: Sentinel-3C carries the Copernicus Earth-observation program forward, and FLEX will study vegetation fluorescence from orbit. Both matter to the European Space Agency's science and operational monitoring portfolios. This is a commercial European launch worth noting, even though Vega-C's cadence is far below Falcon 9's.

The Upcoming Quarter: Firefly Alpha Block 2 and Martian Moons

Two missions beyond mid-September worth flagging for the shape of the fall.

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket is targeting a Block 2 debut on mission FLTA008 from Vandenberg SLC-2 in Q4 2026. Block 2 adds larger liquid oxygen tanks on both stages, extending overall vehicle length by two meters. This is the first significant Alpha iteration since its operational debut, and it matters for the small-sat launch market where Firefly competes with Isar Spectrum, Rocket Lab's Electron, and Relativity Space's Terran R.

More distant but more significant: JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is targeting an October 19/20 launch on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima. MMX will go to Phobos and Deimos, collect samples from Phobos, and return them to Earth in fiscal year 2031. It is the first sample-return mission from the Martian sphere of influence. NASA, CNES, DLR, and ESA are all partners. If it flies on schedule, MMX will be the highest-profile planetary science launch since Europa Clipper.

One more data point worth noting from the tail end of August: SpaceX's record booster B1063 flew its 35th mission on September 2's Starlink 15-23 flight from Vandenberg. That is not a milestone SpaceX is publicizing — booster reuse records have become almost routine — but it is a useful reminder that the Falcon 9 fleet is deep into a maturity curve that no other rocket program in history has reached. The question for the rest of 2026 is whether the same reuse economics will begin to appear in the commercial station and lunar transfer vehicle programs currently in development. That is a 2027 and 2028 story. But the Falcon 9 fleet is the proof of concept.

The week ahead is a strong opener for September. The Roman Space Telescope launch, if it holds, sets the tone. For background on why wide-field infrared survey telescopes matter to cosmology — and how Roman's approach differs from James Webb's — see our explainers on orbital shell architecture and the broader space economy context.

— Atlas Renner, Editor-in-Chief, SpaceOrbitals

Sources

• Spaceflight Now — Launch Schedule
• Spaceflight Now — Roman Space Telescope poised for launch
• Spaceflight Now — SpaceX 100th orbital mission of 2026
• Spaceflight Now — LandSpace first Chinese company to land orbital booster