Spaceflight Daily Report, Friday 2nd October 2026

Crew-12 pose for a portrait ahead of their departure next week. Image credit: NASA/Anil Menon

International Space Station Activities

The crew of the SpaceX Crew-13 mission, having docked to the forward port of the International Space Station's Harmony module late last night, opened the hatch and joined the rest of the station's crew at 0119 UTC this morning. Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk, and Sergey Teteryatnikov are expected to spend around five months aboard the station. The station's crew were off duty for most of today, as they will be working over the weekend. With the arrival of Crew-13, the preceding Crew-12 mission (Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot, and Andrey Fedyaev) will make preparations to head back to Earth, possibly as soon as Monday. The crew of the Soyuz MS-29 mission (Pyotr Dubrov, Anna Kikina, and Anil Menon) will remain on the station along with Crew-13. Meir is expected to pass command of the station to Dubrov on Sunday. [Source: NASA]

Launch of NROL-97

SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 0354 UTC, or 2354 local time (EDT). This mission was designated NROL-97, and it was carrying a classified payload for the United States National Reconnaissance Office. This was the 14th flight of the Falcon Heavy. It was the 2nd and 4th flight of side boosters B1104 and B1072, which each performed a boostback burn and returned to land at Cape Canaveral's landing zones 1 and 2. It was the first and only flight of the expendable central booster, B1106. [Source: SpaceX]

Other notes

UPDATE: North Korea launched a ballistic missile that reached space on this day. See 13th October 2026 for details.

UPDATE: UARX Space's OSSIE satellite, launched on Transporter-18 yesterday, deployed all of its remaining payloads today. See the Transporter-18 launch manifest for details of what they are. [Source: Jonathan McDowell's GCAT]

Spaceflight Daily Report, Sunday 30th August 2026

Image credit: NASA

Launch of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1126 UTC, or 0726 local time (EDT). This was carrying NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It was the 13th flight of the Falcon Heavy. The rocket's two side boosters were B1104 and B1072, on their first and third flights respectively, which both performed boostback burns after separation and landed successfully at Landing Zones 40 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The expendable central booster was B1105, on its first and only flight. [Source: SpaceX]

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer and the driving voice behind many of NASA's space observatories, who passed away in 2018. Roman's primary instrument is the Wide Field Instrument, which will take infrared photographs at a similar resolution to the Hubble Space Telescope but with a field of view a hundred times wider, complementing the James Webb Space Telescope's ability to take extremely high resolution images of a very small patch of sky. It will perform surveys of the sky that are expected to discover tens of thousands of exoplanets and provide better constraints for theories of dark matter and dark energy. A secondary instrument called the Coronagraph Instrument will also attempt to take direct images of exoplanets, as opposed to detecting them via the influence they have on their host stars. Roman is now on its way to the Earth-Sun L2 point, an optimal location for astronomy. The primary mission is aiming to operate for five years, and the telescope has enough fuel to remain stable at L2 for at least a further five years after that. It also has the necessary hardware for an optional refuelling mission in the future. [Source: NASA]

SpaceX Crew-13 Delay

The SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station, originally due to launch on 12th September, has been delayed. Routine pre-flight checks revealed an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of Crew Dragon Grace, which previously flew on Axiom Mission 4. NASA and SpaceX have not yet announced a new launch date. [Source: NASA]