Italy’s COSMO-SkyMed CSG-3 radar satellite launches on 21st-flight SpaceX Falcon 9 to start 2026

On a clear Friday evening along California’s Central Coast, a soot-streaked Falcon 9 rocket lit up the sky over Vandenberg Space Force Base, carrying Italy’s newest radar “eye” toward a polar orbit—and then booming back to its launch site eight minutes later.

First orbital launch of 2026

The Jan. 2 mission, lifting off at 6:09 p.m. Pacific time from Space Launch Complex 4 East, was the first orbital launch of 2026 anywhere in the world. It sent the third satellite in Italy’s COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation constellation into a sun-synchronous orbit about 385 miles above Earth, where it will watch the planet’s surface day and night for both civil and military users.

The flight also underscored a new reality in global spaceflight: a critical European national security and climate-monitoring asset rode to space on a heavily reused American commercial rocket.

A dual-use radar system

The satellite—COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Flight Model 3, or CSG-3—is part of a dual-use radar system owned by the Italian Space Agency and Italy’s Ministry of Defense. The constellation is designed to help authorities map floods and earthquakes, track the effects of climate change, and provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data for the Italian armed forces and allied militaries.

“Each COSMO-SkyMed launch represents a significant achievement for the Italian national space system and its supply chain,” Massimo Claudio Comparini, managing director of Leonardo’s space division, said in a statement. “Earth observation and the data it provides are a strategic asset for security and sustainability, enabling increasingly targeted and timely services and interventions.”

Built by Thales Alenia Space—a joint venture between France’s Thales and Italy’s Leonardo—CSG-3 uses an X-band synthetic aperture radar that can image the ground with resolutions down to tens of centimeters in some modes. Unlike optical cameras, the radar payload can see through clouds, smoke and darkness, giving operators all-weather, around-the-clock coverage.

Thales Alenia Space said the second-generation satellites offer “substantial technological and performance progress” compared with the first four COSMO-SkyMed spacecraft launched between 2007 and 2010. CSG-3 is understood to be the heaviest and most capable of the new series so far, with a more flexible antenna that can observe multiple areas during a single pass and a laser reflector array that allows ground teams to pinpoint image locations with millimeter-scale accuracy.

Separation, contact, and commissioning

About 13 minutes after liftoff, the roughly 2.2-ton satellite separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage into its target orbit. Fifty-nine minutes later, controllers at Telespazio’s Fucino Space Centre in central Italy established contact and began the launch and early-orbit phase—expected to last about nine days—before in-orbit testing and commissioning.

A 21-time-flown booster returns to land

The mission relied on Falcon 9 first stage B1081, making its 21st trip to space. The booster had previously flown NASA’s Crew-7 mission to the International Space Station and launched scientific satellites including the agency’s PACE and TRACERS missions.

After staging over the Pacific, the first stage flipped, fired its engines and steered back toward the California coast, descending to a pinpoint touchdown at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 4 about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the 31st landing at Vandenberg’s pad and the company’s 554th successful Falcon booster recovery overall.

Local authorities temporarily closed nearby Surf Beach and Ocean Park and set up roadblocks in surrounding communities during the launch window. Residents reported hearing one or more sonic booms as the returning rocket passed overhead.

What COSMO-SkyMed does—civil and military

From space, CSG-3 will join two earlier second-generation satellites, launched in 2019 and 2022, and three operational first-generation satellites that together form one of Europe’s most advanced radar Earth-observation systems. The network has already produced millions of images used for disaster response, environmental monitoring and defense.

Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, called COSMO-SkyMed “one of the most outstanding examples of cooperation between Defense, the Italian Space Agency, and national industry” in a social media post after the launch. He described the program as “a model of public-private synergy that shows how innovation, research, and development can integrate with security and defense needs, generating strategic value for the country.”

The civil side of the program is central to Italy’s and Europe’s climate and disaster-management efforts. COSMO-SkyMed data feeds into the European Union’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service, which produces rapid maps of floods, wildfires, earthquakes and other crises for first responders around the world. The new satellite’s ability to handle more imaging requests more quickly is expected to shorten response times and increase coverage of disaster zones.

Beyond emergencies, the radar instruments track glacier movement and ice loss, measure land subsidence under coastal cities, monitor deforestation and map changes along eroding shorelines. Agriculture, energy, insurance and infrastructure companies buy commercial products derived from the imagery through e-GEOS, a joint venture between the Italian Space Agency and Telespazio.

At the same time, COSMO-SkyMed has a clear military dimension. X-band synthetic aperture radar can detect ships, vehicles and changes in installations with high precision, regardless of weather or lighting. Italian officials say the constellation supports national defense missions and allied operations, including within NATO and the European Union, though specifics on tasking priorities and data-sharing are not made public.

Europe’s launcher gap—and SpaceX’s pull

The way CSG-3 reached orbit highlights another set of tensions: Europe’s long-stated goal of “strategic autonomy” in space versus the practical pull of SpaceX’s launch capacity.

The first second-generation satellite flew on Europe’s small Vega rocket from French Guiana. The second—and now the third—have relied on Falcon 9 after delays and reliability problems sidelined the upgraded Vega-C and Europe retired its heavy-lift Ariane 5 before its successor, Ariane 6, ramped up operations.

European officials have said they aim to support domestic launchers, but national agencies and commercial customers have increasingly turned to SpaceX to keep schedules on track. Two of Italy’s three second-generation COSMO-SkyMed satellites now have departed from U.S. soil atop Falcon 9 rockets, including a spacecraft co-owned by the country’s defense ministry.

Reuse becomes the default

For SpaceX, the CSG-3 launch was a relatively routine start to a year the company is expected to pack with more Falcon and Starship missions. The firm completed 165 Falcon launches and five Starship test flights in 2025, according to company figures, and has come to dominate Vandenberg’s manifest, accounting for the vast majority of launches there last year.

That cadence is made possible in part by deep reusability. Where governments once favored brand-new rockets for high-value satellites, agencies such as NASA—and now Italy’s space and defense authorities—are flying multi-billion-euro missions on boosters that have already launched 20 times or more.

“Being responsible for the overall COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation program, Thales Alenia Space is extremely proud of this successful launch,” Giampiero Di Paolo, head of Thales Alenia Space Italy and its Earth observation, exploration and navigation business, said after CSG-3 reached orbit. “Once fully deployed with its four satellites, it will provide substantial technological and performance progress, strengthening Thales Alenia Space’s global leadership in space-based Earth observation infrastructure.”

What’s next

One more second-generation satellite, CSG-4, is planned later this decade. Italian and European officials have indicated they hope to fly it on a European launcher, such as Vega-C, but have not ruled out other options.

For now, as the first orbital mission of 2026, CSG-3’s ride to space encapsulated the state of the industry: a high-precision European radar satellite built to track floods, forests and troop movements alike, leaving Earth on a heavily reused American rocket from a U.S. military base, then circling back over a planet that is watching itself more closely every year.