SpaceX flies its second Starfall reentry capsule on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare

SpaceX flew its second Starfall reentry capsule on Tuesday. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission, a day late after weather in the booster recovery zone forced a scrub on Monday, Spaceflight Now reported. The SpaceX mission page lists 32 payloads on board, including cubesats, microsats and reentry vehicles.

The first stage, booster B1085, landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic on its 19th flight, per NASASpaceFlight. Its earlier missions include NASA's Crew-9, Fram2 and Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1. Customer satellites began separating about 57 minutes after liftoff, and Spaceflight Now reported at 8:45 a.m. EDT that all customer payloads were deployed. The SpaceX timeline put Starfall last, at about two hours and 48 minutes into the flight. SpaceNews also covered the launch.

Starfall is a disk-shaped capsule about 3.1 meters across and 0.75 meters tall, with a mass of about 2,100 kilograms and room for up to 1,000 kilograms of payload, according to an FAA environmental assessment cited by Spaceflight Now. The first one, Starfall Demo, flew on June 23. NASASpaceFlight reports that the capsule can stay in orbit indefinitely and come home when SpaceX chooses, using cold-gas nitrogen thrusters to orient itself, a heat shield it can jettison and parachutes for a splashdown that SpaceX crews recover. Early tests are planned to come down in the Pacific about 1,300 km off the coast of the United States or Mexico. SpaceX plans to use Starfall for goods made in microgravity and for point-to-point cargo, and later to fly several capsules at once on Starship.

Starfall shared the ride with another return capsule. Varda Space Industries flew its W-Series 7 spacecraft, which carries a cancer drug called PROTAC to test whether microgravity can improve its solubility. Portal Space Systems flew its Starburst-1 demo, and Xona Space Systems added six navigation satellites, according to Spaceflight Now.

Key facts

• Falcon 9 launched Bandwagon-5 on Oct. 20, 2026, from SLC-40 in Florida after an Oct. 19 weather scrub (Spaceflight Now).
• 32 payloads flew, including the second SpaceX Starfall capsule (SpaceX).
• Booster B1085 landed on A Shortfall of Gravitas on its 19th flight (NASASpaceFlight).
• Starfall is 3.1 m wide, about 2,100 kg, and carries up to 1,000 kg of payload (Spaceflight Now).
• Varda's W-Series 7 capsule carries a PROTAC cancer drug experiment (NASASpaceFlight).

How to read it

Reaching orbit is the first half of a Starfall mission. The part that shows whether the product works is the return: a controlled reentry, a parachute splashdown and recovery at sea. SpaceX has not said when this capsule will come back, and Spaceflight Now notes the company did not state what, if anything, it carries.

Independence

Beam42 wrote this note from the SpaceX Bandwagon-5 mission page, with independent reporting from Spaceflight Now, NASASpaceFlight and SpaceNews. It is not a SpaceX release.