Bandwagon-5 lifts off with SpaceX's Starfall and Varda's W-7

Second time lucky. A day after weather in the recovery zone forced a scrub, as we reported in our preview of the mission, SpaceX launched its Bandwagon-5 rideshare on Tuesday. Falcon 9 left Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral at 7:04 a.m. EDT (11:04 UTC, 14:04 Kyiv time), Space.com reports. SpaceX had moved the target from the original 6:30 a.m. slot and rated the weather 95% favourable shortly before launch.

Booster back on the droneship

The first stage, booster B1085, was flying for the 19th time. It landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic about nine minutes after liftoff. Spaceflight Now had noted before launch that a successful landing would be the 167th on that ship and the 672nd Falcon booster landing overall.

Starfall's second flight

The headline payload belongs to SpaceX itself. Starfall is the company's uncrewed reentry capsule, which flew its first demonstration mission on 23 June. SpaceX describes it as a way to give researchers and companies "affordable, routine access" to microgravity for experiments and in-space manufacturing, then bring the results home.

The company has shared very little about it. Most public details come from a US Federal Aviation Administration environmental assessment. According to that document, the disc-shaped capsule is about 0.75 m tall and 3.1 m wide, weighs roughly 2,100 kg and can return about 1,000 kg of payload. Starfall sits on top of the payload stack and is the last item due to separate, about 2 hours 48 minutes after liftoff. SpaceX hasn't said what it is carrying or when it will come back.

Varda's W-7 and the rest of the stack

Varda Space Industries flew its W-7 capsule, the company's latest orbital "mini-factory". It carries a cancer-drug compound to test whether crystals grown in microgravity dissolve better. Like Starfall, it is designed to return to Earth, but no landing date was given in the sources we checked.

The other payloads are a mix of cubesats and microsats. They include Planet's high-resolution Pelican-12 Earth-observation satellite, four HawkEye 360 radio-frequency monitoring satellites, six Xona Space Systems navigation satellites and four satellites for Finland's ICEYE, whose radar satellite was recently shadowed by a Russian spacecraft. Deployments were scheduled over almost two hours, starting about 57 minutes after launch.

Bandwagon is the smaller of SpaceX's two rideshare programmes. The other, Transporter, has flown 18 missions. Rideshares and returning capsules made it a busy few days in space: Japan's MMX probe set off for Mars's moon Phobos on Monday. If all this has you looking up at night, our beginner telescope guide and binoculars for stargazing guide are good places to start.