Technology

SpaceX reached its 100th Falcon mission of 2026 on August 22 with the Starlink 15-20 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, counting 99 Falcon 9 flights plus one Falcon Heavy. Booster B1100 completed its ninth flight and landed successfully on a Pacific droneship roughly 8.5 minutes after liftoff. Sources disagree on whether the mission carried 27 or 29 Starlink satellites, leaving the precise payload count unresolved.

A computational study led by Eduard I. Vorobyov modeled the formation of several Earth masses of planetesimals in a protoplanetary disk originating from Population III supernova debris at redshift approximately 17, roughly 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang. The study does not report observed planets or completed rocky worlds; planetesimals are precursors to terrestrial planets, and the simulation stops after about 0.1 million years of disk evolution. Planetesimal formation in the model is parameterized rather than directly resolved, and no independent replication or unaffiliated expert assessment has been located as of August 2026.