A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:49 p.m. EDT on Sunday, September 13, delivering the final three satellites of SES’s O3b mPOWER constellation to medium Earth orbit. The flight simultaneously marked the 700th combined launch for the Falcon rocket family, comprising 687 Falcon 9 missions and 13 Falcon Heavy missions.
The back-to-back milestones mark a significant moment for both commercial launch and satellite broadband infrastructure.
A constellation four years in the making
The first two O3b mPOWER satellites launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 16, 2022, with subsequent launches in pairs in April 2023, November 2023, December 2024, and July 2025. The three spacecraft join the ten O3b mPOWER satellites already operating in MEO, bringing the full constellation to 13 satellites.
Each Boeing-built satellite has a dry mass of 1,900 kg, according to SES, and runs on an all-electric propulsion system that will spend the coming months raising the craft to their operational altitude. The newly launched satellites are not yet carrying commercial traffic; they must reach their operating orbits and pass technical checks before entering service, a process SES expects to finish around the middle of 2027.
Prior to the launches of the fifth and sixth satellites, an electrical issue was discovered that was found to impact both the broadband capacity and the estimated operational life of those satellites. Boeing re-engineered power system components and applied software routing modifications, addressing power module anomalies that surfaced on early O3b mPOWER satellites. Those power degradation issues prompted SES and Boeing to expand their procurement contract and implement hardware mitigations for system longevity.
To compensate, changes were made to satellites 7, 11 and two additional spacecraft were added to the constellation.
What the completed network delivers
The September 13 mission completes deployment of SES’s second-generation medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation, which is designed to deliver high-throughput, low-latency connectivity for government, enterprise, mobility, cloud and telecommunications customers.
Medium Earth orbit gives the constellation a meaningful edge in latency over traditional geostationary platforms. Geostationary satellites orbit at 35,786 kilometers, where a signal takes roughly 600 milliseconds to complete a round trip, making real-time applications such as video calls noticeably sluggish. O3b mPOWER satellites orbit at an altitude of around 8,000 km, cutting that delay significantly for enterprise and government customers where network uptime is critical.
SES said the three additions will increase capacity and resilience for enterprise, government, mobility and telecommunications customers, particularly in remote or difficult-to-serve locations.
The completed network sits at the heart of a satellite broadband market where, as the vulnerability of terrestrial telecom infrastructure has recently underscored, operators and governments are actively looking to space-based alternatives for resilience.
The Falcon 700 milestone in context
The launch marked the 700th mission for the Falcon rocket family. What began in March 2006 with the modest flights of the Falcon 1 has grown into one of the most prolific commercial rocket families in aerospace history. The Falcon 1 flew a total of five times, twice successfully, before giving way to the workhorse Falcon 9 in 2010, giving the full program a history that predates Falcon 9 by several years.
SpaceX launched the mPOWER-F mission using Falcon 9 first-stage booster B1080, completing its 29th flight after previously supporting four missions to the International Space Station, the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory, SES’s Astra 1P, and 22 batches of Starlink satellites. B1080 started its career carrying a Crew Dragon with astronauts for the Axiom-2 mission and later launched another Crew Dragon on Axiom-3. The four ISS missions also included the NG-21 Cygnus cargo spacecraft and the CRS-30 Dragon resupply mission.
Following stage separation, the booster returned to Earth, touching down on the SpaceX droneship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” in the Atlantic Ocean more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff.
The launch also marked the 400th orbital launch to take flight from SLC-40, of which SpaceX was responsible for 345. The pace of reusable launch operations has grown so relentless that cadence milestones now routinely arrive alongside payload milestones.
For the satellite industry, that cadence is enabling increasingly complex constellation buildouts. Distributed computing architectures designed to split workloads across heterogeneous hardware are already being evaluated for the ground-system software that processes data streaming from large MEO networks like O3b mPOWER.
What comes next for SES
The satellites deployed on September 13 complete a constellation that SES describes as “purpose-engineered to deliver predictable low latency, superior throughput and unprecedented flexibility for industries where continuity is critical.”
With all 13 spacecraft now in orbit and the final trio expected to enter service by the middle of 2027 after completing their orbit-raising maneuvers and necessary checkouts and commissioning, SES will turn its attention to customer onboarding and network optimization.
The completion of O3b mPOWER also sets a benchmark for how established operators can absorb significant mid-program engineering setbacks, adapt hardware across an entire satellite batch, and still deliver a fully operational constellation on a commercially viable timeline.
