On Thursday, August 4 at 7:08 p.m. ET, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) to a ballistic lunar transfer orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, explains the company.
KPLO is now named Danuri and SpaceX successfully deployed the boxy satellite into orbit, seen in the video below. Onboard are various instruments to collect data from the satellite’s expected orbit around the moon in December.
This particular Falcon 9 rocket saw its sixth successful launch and landing. It previously supported the launch of Arabsat-6A, STP-2, COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2, and two Starlink missions. The first stage landed onto SpaceX’s droneship “Just Read the Instructions” successfully, like clockwork.
SpaceX’s Starlink is no longer just a promising satellite internet experiment — it’s a full-blown growth engine. According to new data from Cloudflare, global web traffic flowing through Starlink more than doubled in 2025, underscoring just how quickly the service is scaling worldwide. As reported by Business Insider, Cloudflare’s data shows that Starlink traffic surged […]
As SpaceX continues to rapidly scale Starlink, its suppliers are racing to keep pace. One of them, European chipmaker STMicroelectronics, has revealed just how massive its role in the satellite internet network has become — and how much bigger it’s about to get. According to Reuters, STMicro has shipped more than 5 billion radio-frequency antenna […]
SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is continuing its rapid expansion, and the company is now on track to surpass 10,000 satellites in orbit by February 2026 — a milestone that would cement Starlink as one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever deployed in space. Looking at cumulative deployment trends over the past six years, the pace […]