SpaceX launched its Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, lifting off on a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:04 a.m. EDT (11:04 UTC). The flight came a day late: SpaceX scrubbed Monday’s attempt because of poor weather in the booster recovery zone, as we noted in our Bandwagon-5 preview.
Booster and deployment
The first stage, B1085, was flying for the 19th time and landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic about nine minutes after liftoff. Its earlier missions include Crew-9, Fram2, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ten Starlink flights. Ahead of launch, Spaceflight Now noted that a successful landing would be the 672nd Falcon booster landing overall.
The rocket carried 32 payloads: 31 customer spacecraft plus SpaceX’s own Starfall capsule. Payload deployment started at about T+57 minutes, and Spaceflight Now reported at 8:45 a.m. EDT that SpaceX had confirmed all customer payloads were deployed. Starfall was the last item in the sequence, scheduled to separate about 2 hours 48 minutes after liftoff. At the time of writing, SpaceX hadn’t published a separate update on Starfall’s separation or when the capsule will come back down.
Starfall’s second flight
Starfall is SpaceX’s disk-shaped, recoverable reentry vehicle for microgravity research, in-space manufacturing and point-to-point cargo. According to NASASpaceFlight, it measures 3.1 m across and 0.75 m tall, has a mass of about 2,100 kg and can carry up to 1,000 kg of payload. Cold-gas nitrogen thrusters orient it for reentry, it sheds a jettisonable heat shield, and it splashes down under parachutes. Early test landings are planned in the Pacific roughly 1,300 km off the coast of the US or Mexico. The first Starfall demo flew on June 23, and SpaceX ultimately plans to launch the capsules on Starship.
Who else was on board
Exolaunch handled a large share of the customer manifest. Payloads reported by NASASpaceFlight and Spaceflight Now include:
- Pulsar navigation satellites from Xona Space Systems, the start of a planned commercial positioning, navigation and timing constellation of about 250 satellites.
- Synthetic aperture radar satellites from ICEYE, Capella Space and Umbra, plus radio-frequency monitoring satellites from HawkEye 360.
- Planet’s Pelican-12 high-resolution imager, Impulse Space’s LEO Express 4 orbital transfer vehicle and Portal Space Systems’ Starburst-1.
- Varda Space Industries’ W-7 capsule, which is testing whether microgravity crystallization can improve the solubility of a PROTAC cancer drug.
Bandwagon and Transporter rideshares let small-satellite operators fly payloads of up to 50 kg for about $350,000, far less than buying a dedicated Falcon 9.
Sources: NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, SpaceX mission page.