SpaceX completes SES O3b mPOWER constellation on Falcon family's 700th flight

By the Everything Space news desk · 13 Sep 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Space.com

The launch finished a Boeing-built medium-Earth-orbit broadband network while marking a symbolic milestone for SpaceX's rocket program.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying the last three satellites needed to complete SES' O3b mPOWER constellation, marking the 700th flight overall for the company's Falcon rocket family.

The Falcon 9 lifted off in the afternoon and released its payload into medium Earth orbit roughly 5,000 miles up, deploying the three satellites over a span of about 14 minutes beginning around half an hour after liftoff.

The rocket's first stage returned to Earth and landed on a droneship in the Atlantic about nine minutes after launch, completing its 29th flight, underscoring SpaceX's continued reuse of its booster fleet.

With this mission, SES now has its full complement of O3b mPOWER satellites in orbit, all of which have been launched by SpaceX since the program began in December 2022. The satellites, built by Boeing, are designed to provide low-latency, high-throughput connectivity for industries that depend on constant network uptime.

The Falcon family's 700 flights include a handful of early Falcon 1 launches, hundreds of Falcon 9 missions, and more than a dozen flights of the Falcon Heavy variant. This launch was SpaceX's 107th orbital mission so far in the year, the vast majority flown on Falcon 9 vehicles.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.