The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the American military’s spy satellites, is preparing to launch its fifth mission of the 2025 out of roughly a dozen planned for the year.
The flight, dubbed NROL-69, will launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to an undisclosed orbital location. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is set for 1:48 p.m. EDT (1748 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron, based at Patrick Space Force Base, forecast a 90 percent chance of favorable weather for liftoff on Monday. In its outlook, meteorologists said the primary watch item will be the presence of thick clouds.
“Mid and high clouds associated with the upper-level jet will be streaming across the area on Monday, along with additional clouds from the approaching system,” launch weather officers wrote. “Most of this deck still looks too high and cold to be a Thick Cloud Layers concern, but there remains a slight possibility for lower clouds to come in sooner and threaten the launch window.”
SpaceX plans to use the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1092 for this mission. This will be only its second flight after previously launching the Starlink 12-13 flight on Feb. 27, 2025.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1092 will attempt to land back at Landing Zone 1. If successful, this will be the 50th touchdown at LZ-1 and overall the 422nd booster landing to date.
Phase 2 begins
In August 2020, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance were awarded contracts worth $3.3 billion and and $3.4 billion respectively as part of Phase 2 of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program.
Those contract values were drawn up in May 2019 when U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, which oversees the awarding and execution of these contracts, anticipated a total of 34 missions. By the end of the fifth and final order year (FY24) assigning these missions there were a total of 50 and the contract value was adjusted to $4.5 billion for ULA and $4 billion for SpaceX.
Among the 50 missions awarded to SpaceX and ULA, nine come from the NRO. ULA will launch seven of those and SpaceX will launch two of them.
NROL-69 was one of two missions assigned to SpaceX last part of the second year of task orders, which were issued in March 2021. At the time, the firm-fixed-price contract for both NROL-69 and USSF-36 was valued at roughly $159.7 million.
Originally, USSF-36 was scheduled to launch in the second quarter of FY23, with NROL-69 planned to launch in the fourth quarter of FY23. The reasons for these launch delays have not been disclosed.
With few exceptions, the NRO doesn’t provide details about its various missions, including final orbits, payloads and operational lifetimes. In a pre-launch press kit, the agency had a brief line about what will be onboard the Falcon 9 rocket launching Monday.
“This mission carries a national security payload designed, built, and operated by NRO,” the NRO wrote.
Notices to aviators and mariners indicate the rocket will be taking a northeast trajectory, possibly targeting an initial orbit with an inclination of around 53 degrees. The Falcon 9 rocket itself offers another potential hint about the mission. The second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket has a grey band wrapped around it.
That band is typically used on a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket to help keep the RP-1 kerosene (the rocket’s propellant) at a consistent temperature during notably long coast phases.
One example of this was the June 2024 Falcon Heavy launch of the GOES-U satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which featured a third burn of the Merlin vacuum engine on the upper stage more than 4 hours and 21 minutes into the mission before the payload was deployed 4.5 hours after liftoff.
The most recent use of this protective layer came during the launch of the Transporter-13 smallsat rideshare mission, which launched earlier in March.
SpaceX doesn’t often discuss this grey stripe, but it was briefly brought up by Ronnie Foreman, a SpaceX commercial sales manager, during the July 28, 2023, launch of the Jupiter-3 mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket. According to Forman, the mission debuted a new medium-coast configuration.
“Our second stages have three general configurations: standard, medium and long-coast. And we use different configurations depending on how long the second stage needs to operate after launch,” Foreman explained. “A medium-coast kit, which is what we’re using today, provides better performance for some missions and includes an added battery loaf or power pack, a painted gray stripe on the outside of the fuel tank and other hardware to make sure that the fuel and stages systems operate as long as needed, once we get to space.
“While in space, the paint will absorb heat from the Sun in order to keep the second stage fuel warm enough for our long flight today.”
Like with the GOES-U mission, there were three burns of the upper stage engine before the Jupiter-3 satellite was deployed.
