SpaceX sends 25 more Starlink satellites up from Vandenberg after a one-day scrub

SpaceX launched the Starlink 17-18 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4:00:19 a.m. PDT on Sunday, and later confirmed deployment of all 25 satellites. Spaceflight Now reported that the mission had slipped from Saturday before flying successfully Sunday morning, while the Falcon 9 first stage, B1097, completed its seventh flight and landed on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Pacific. The launch pushed the Starlink constellation past 9,900 spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

This is the kind of high-cadence operational story that keeps showing how routine orbital delivery has become for SpaceX, even when a scrub briefly interrupts the flow.

The next checkpoints are the ones that define the bigger Starlink picture: sustained west-coast tempo, continued booster reuse, and whether the company keeps turning what used to be major events into near-utility infrastructure. This mission was one of the clearest real-time operations stories on the board.