Falcon 9 liftoff of USSF-259 from Vandenberg. Credit: SpaceX / X
SpaceX just got USSF-259 off the pad after Tuesday’s scrub, sending a Falcon 9 skyward from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Wednesday, September 16, 2026.
The company confirmed liftoff on X a few minutes after the four-hour window opened at 6:00 p.m. PT, then followed with a droneship recovery: Falcon 9’s first stage landed on Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific.
That closes the loop on the scrubbed Tuesday attempt that pushed the same mission into Wednesday’s window. Earlier in the evening SpaceX said systems looked good with weather about 95 percent favorable and propellant load underway, linking the public USSF-259 mission page before the webcast and liftoff posts.
USSF-259 is a U.S. Space Force flight with a classified payload, the same national-security lane that flew USSF-153 from the same Vandenberg pad about a week earlier. Payload details stay under wraps as usual for Space Force missions, and SpaceX has not published a booster flight count for this stack in the liftoff or landing notes.
The West Coast success keeps SpaceX’s national-security cadence moving beside the commercial pace that recently marked Falcon’s 700th overall flight and the company’s push toward Starship Flight 14’s first planned Earth orbit.
SpaceX has not yet posted a separate payload-deploy confirmation for USSF-259 in the public thread, so the scoreboard for now is liftoff plus a clean OCISLY landing after the one-day scrub delay.
