Falcon Heavy Returns After 560 Days to Close Out the Troubled ViaSat-3 Constellation
SpaceX targets April 27 to launch ViaSat-3 F3 to the Asia-Pacific, ending Falcon Heavy's longest gap and capping a constellation that lost 90% of its first satellite to an antenna failure.
Overview
SpaceX is targeting Monday, April 27, 2026 for the next flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying the ViaSat-3 F3 satellite to a geostationary transfer orbit from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Viasat confirmed in an April 20 press release. The 85-minute launch window opens at 10:21 a.m. EDT.
The mission ends an extended pause for SpaceX’s heaviest active rocket — the previous Falcon Heavy launch, NASA’s Europa Clipper, lifted off from the same pad on October 14, 2024, roughly 560 days earlier. It also closes out a satellite constellation whose first member lost more than 90 percent of its capacity to a stuck antenna and whose second was repeatedly scrubbed by faulty Atlas booster hardware before finally reaching orbit on a different rocket.
What Is Launching
ViaSat-3 F3 is the third and final spacecraft in Viasat’s Ka-band, geostationary ViaSat-3 series. According to Viasat’s launch announcement, the satellite is designed to deliver more than 1 terabit per second of throughput over the Asia-Pacific region and will serve commercial mobility, fixed services, and defense customers. Viasat says F3 introduces “new functional capabilities including new forms of resilience for U.S. and international government customers.”
Falcon Heavy will deliver the spacecraft to a high-energy transfer orbit, after which ViaSat-3 F3’s onboard electric propulsion will spiral the satellite up to its final geostationary slot — a process Viasat expects to take several months. Operational service is targeted for late summer 2026, following on-orbit testing of the bus and payload, the company said.
In its press release, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said the satellite would “substantially increase capacity that is secure, reliable and highly flexible” and called it part of the company’s transition toward a unified, multi-orbit network architecture, according to the announcement carried by GlobeNewswire.
The Booster Configuration
Falcon Heavy is a three-core vehicle, and SpaceX’s recovery plan for this flight is mixed. According to Spaceflight Now’s launch schedule, the two side boosters — B1072, on its second flight, and B1075, on its 22nd flight — will perform return-to-launch-site landings at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 2 and the new Landing Zone 40, the recovery pad SpaceX co-located with launch complex SLC-40. The center core will be expended after deploying the payload, with no recovery attempted.
The expended center stage reflects the energy demands of pushing a heavy communications satellite directly into a high-energy geostationary transfer orbit, the same mission profile that has historically required Falcon Heavy rather than a single-stick Falcon 9.
A Troubled Constellation
The ViaSat-3 program has been one of the most public satellite-mishap stories of the past three years. The first satellite, ViaSat-3 F1, launched on Falcon Heavy in April 2023 but suffered an antenna deployment failure that, according to SpaceNews, reduced the spacecraft’s throughput by more than 90 percent. Viasat filed a $421 million insurance claim for the hobbled spacecraft and ultimately put it into limited commercial service, with plans to relocate it once F2 or F3 was on station, the same SpaceNews report noted.
The second satellite, ViaSat-3 F2, was eventually launched by United Launch Alliance on an Atlas 5 551 from Cape Canaveral on November 13, 2025, after a one-week delay caused by a faulty liquid-oxygen tank vent valve on the Atlas booster that required replacement. That mission added more than 1 Tbps of Ka-band capacity over the Americas, Spaceflight Now reported.
With Monday’s launch, F3 will give Viasat its first full ViaSat-3 trio in orbit and provide the Asia-Pacific coverage region the company has been waiting on for almost three years.
What We Don’t Know
Florida’s spring weather is the most immediate variable, but neither Viasat nor SpaceX has published a public weather forecast tied to specific launch criteria in the cited materials. Viasat has also not disclosed precise figures for F3’s launch mass, the duration of its electric-propulsion climb to the geostationary belt, or what fraction of the satellite’s capacity will be reserved for the U.S. and allied government customers cited in the press release.
The long-term commercial picture is also unsettled. F1 still cannot deliver its full design throughput, and Viasat has previously indicated it would shift the hobbled satellite to a less demanding slot once newer ViaSat-3 spacecraft were operational, per SpaceNews. Whether that reshuffling happens after F3 enters service in late summer — and how much usable capacity F1 contributes after the move — remains to be confirmed by the company.
If Monday’s launch is successful, it will end the longest hiatus in Falcon Heavy’s history since the vehicle’s 2018 debut.