In the wee hours of the middle of the night last night, SpaceX sent a Falcon 9 carrying the GPS III-8 satellite to medium Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Liftoff was at 2:53 AM EDT into mostly clear skies and pleasant temperatures.
Around 8.5 minutes after launch, Booster B1095.7 safely touched down on ASDS ‘Just Read The Instructions,’ marking the 156th landing on the venerable drone ship. SpaceX announced tonight that JRTI will be retired from Falcon 9 duty after this mission, and will be “dedicated to Starship operations going forward.”
‘Just Read The Instructions’ will return to Port Canaveral with B1095.7 after a few days, and the booster will be offloaded and transported to SpaceX’s facilities at Kennedy Space Center for inspection, any needed refurbishments and preparation for its next mission.
Payload
The GPS III Space Vehicle 10 satellite is nicknamed “Hedy Lamarr” after the Hollywood actress who co-patented the frequency-hopping technology that underpins modern GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, was designed and built by Lockheed Martin at the company’s GPS III Processing Facility in Waterton, Colorado, just southwest of Denver.
It is the tenth and final spacecraft produced under the original GPS III production contract, a program awarded to Lockheed Martin in May 2008 to develop a third generation of Navstar GPS satellites. Lockheed Martin completed SV10 in 2022 and the Space Force declared it “Available for Launch” on Dec. 8 of that year, after which it was placed in storage at the company’s Colorado facility to await a launch call-up.
Hedy Lamarr is built on Lockheed Martin’s A2100M satellite bus, with composite propellant and pressurant tanks manufactured by Orbital ATK and eight deployable JIB navigation antennas designed and built by Northrop Grumman Astro Aerospace.
The GPS III design is noticeably more elongated than earlier generations, with roughly 7.5 square meters of body area and a nominal on-orbit mass of about 2,160 kilograms. Once deployed, the satellite uses its own liquid apogee engines to raise itself from the Falcon 9 insertion orbit to its operational slot near 12,550 miles altitude, a process that will take roughly 10 days before on-orbit checkout begins.
Launch Replay
Next Launch
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Mission | Falcon Heavy | ViaSat-3 F3 (ViaSat-3 Asia-Pacific) — Go for Launch! |
| Organization | SpaceX |
| Customer / Payload Provider | Viasat |
| Location | Kennedy Space Center, FL, USA |
| Rocket | Falcon Heavy |
| Pad | Launch Complex 39A |
| Status | Go for Launch |
| Status Info | Current T-0 confirmed by official or reliable sources. |
| Window Opens | Monday, 04/27/2026 10:21 AM |
| Window Closes | Monday, 04/27/2026 11:46 AM |
| Destination | Geostationary Transfer Orbit |
| Mission Description | ViaSat-3 is a series of three Ka-band satellites expected to provide vastly superior capabilities in terms of service speed and flexibility for a satellite platform. Each ViaSat-3 class satellite is expected to deliver more than 1 Terabit per second of network capacity, and to leverage high levels of flexibility to dynamically direct capacity to where customers are located. |
| Broadcast Start Time | Coverage typically begins ~15 minutes before launch. |
| SpaceX Streaming Coverage | Watch Live on SpaceX.com |
| Spaceflight Now YouTube Coverage | Watch on YouTube – Spaceflight Now Live Stream |
As of Sunday, April 19, 2026. Launch times are subject to change or cancellation at any time. Consult SpaceX.com for more information.
Author: Charles Boyer
NASA kid from Cocoa Beach, FL, born of Project Apollo parents and family. I’m a writer and photographer sharing the story of spaceflight from the Eastern Range here in Florida.
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