Falcon 9 Launch of SDA Tranche 1 Mission From Vandenberg SFB Scheduled Thursday Afternoon

VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (KEYT) – A Falcon 9 launch of the Space Development Agency's third Tranche 1 transport mission is scheduled from Vandenberg SFB on Thursday afternoon.

The mission's 22-minute launch window opens on Thursday, July 16, at 1:22 p.m. and a backup launch window has been designated for the following day, Friday, July 17, beginning at 1:24 p.m. shared SpaceX.

A live webcast of the launch will begin about ten minutes before liftoff. You can watch that webcast here or on SpaceX's X/Twitter account.

Following first-stage separation, the booster assigned to this mission will return to Earth to land on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship awaiting in the Pacific Ocean.

A depiction of that launch sequence is shown in the image below.

There is the potential for one or more sonic booms to be heard across the local region during the launch process, but how far the sound travels will depend on weather and other conditions at launch time.

The payload on this mission includes space vehicles that will transport satellites destined for a low-Earth orbit as part of the layered network of satellites known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture which provides global tactical military communications and missile detection and tracking capabilities on behalf of the Department of Defense's Space Development Agency.

Currently, the Department of Defense uses about ten missile defense satellites operating in a geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of about 22,000 miles, but the far smaller Tranche mission satellites will operate at a lower altitude of approximately 600 miles above the Earth.

"As threats to space expand, we can no longer rely on a strategy of putting most of our capabilities into these few large exquisite satellite systems," explained Kari Bingen, Director of the Aerospace Security Project at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Now the DOD [Department of Defense] is taking the approach of building many systems on shorter timelines."

Thursday's mission will be the third of ten planed Falcon 9 launches on behalf of the defense agency's Tranche network. The first two launches were successfully completed on September 9, 2025, and the second was on October 14, 2025.

This will be the fourth flight for the Falcon 9 booster assigned to this mission which previously launched the NROL-179 mission and two Starlink launches.