A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:53 a.m. EDT Tuesday carrying the tenth and final GPS III satellite. [1] Space Vehicle 10 (SV10), launching as the GPS III-8 mission, will join a fleet of 38 GPS spacecraft in medium Earth orbit — 32 of them active — and close out a 12-year program Lockheed Martin began delivering in 2014.

The booster is B1095, flying its seventh mission after six Starlink flights, with a drone-ship landing planned on "Just Read the Instructions." [1] The mission's origin is the story. GPS III SV10 was originally manifested on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan; when the earlier GPS III SV07 was transferred from Falcon to Vulcan, SV10 traded places onto Falcon. In exchange, ULA will fly the USSF-70 national-security mission on Vulcan. [1] SpaceNews flagged the payload's Tesat-Spacecom laser communications terminal — a first-of-its-kind test for optical inter-satellite links on a GPS bus. [2]

The launch is a structural backstop to a week of GNSS-spoofing headlines. The paper's war-second-order-effects thread has traced how spoofed tanker positions accelerated the Strait of Hormuz blockade arithmetic. A 38-satellite constellation with 32 active vehicles is the physical layer of global navigation; Tuesday's launch adds one more signal source to a system the Pentagon has been upgrading partly because peer adversaries have learned to spoof it. The next-generation GPS IIIF satellites, carrying further anti-jamming and laser-communications upgrades, begin launching in 2027. The last GPS III flies before dawn Tuesday. Backup window: 2:49 a.m. ET Wednesday.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo