Rocket Lab launches a 13th radar satellite for Japan's Synspective on its 97th Electron flight

Rocket Lab launched its 97th Electron rocket at 00:39 UTC on 26 September 2026, 12:39 in New Zealand, and placed the 13th StriX radar satellite for the Japanese company Synspective directly into a 559 km low Earth orbit. The mission, named “Owlright Owlright Owlright”, was Rocket Lab’s 18th launch of 2026, according to its mission release.

Synspective confirmed the deployment the same day and will spend the coming months testing and commissioning the satellite before it enters service. All 13 StriX satellites have reached orbit on Electron, and three of them flew in September.

When and where did the 97th Electron launch?

Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 12:39 New Zealand Standard Time on 26 September 2026, which was 00:39 UTC and 01:39 in London. The rocket delivered the StriX satellite directly into its 559 km orbit, and Rocket Lab counts all 13 StriX launches as successes.

How does a radar satellite see through cloud and at night?

A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite supplies its own illumination: it fires pulses of microwaves at the ground and records the echoes that come back. A camera on an optical satellite records sunlight reflected off the surface, so it needs daylight and a clear sky. Radar, in the words of NASA’s Earthdata guide to SAR, “enables high resolution imagery to be created night or day, regardless of weather conditions.”

The strength of each echo depends on the shape and roughness of what the pulse hits. In Synspective’s words, its satellites “observe terrain and the shape of structures”. Comparing passes over the same spot shows what changed between them, which Synspective sells for disaster response, infrastructure monitoring and security.

The “synthetic aperture” is a trick of processing. A radar’s sharpness grows with the length of its antenna, so the satellite combines many echoes gathered along its path to simulate an antenna far longer than the one it carries, NASA’s guide explains.

StriX packs the radar into a 100 kg-class satellite, about a tenth of a conventional large SAR satellite, according to Synspective’s specifications:

X-band radar works at a wavelength of about 3 cm, which NASA’s guide lists for high-resolution work such as urban monitoring. Most of the sample images in Synspective’s data gallery resolve 0.46 m by 0.5 m.

Electron flew three StriX missions in September

Rocket Lab launched the 11th, 12th and 13th StriX satellites between 2 and 26 September 2026, on Electron flights 94, 96 and 97. The last two went up six days and 21 hours apart.

Each StriX flies alone on its rocket, and Rocket Lab builds a specially configured Electron fairing sized to the satellite.

Most of the 13 mission names play on owls, from “The Owls Night Begins” in December 2020 to “Owl By The Dozen” for the 12th.

Synspective took the name StriX from the owl species Strix uralensis, because owls can “forage even in total darkness” and its radar images the ground at night.

How many more StriX launches are booked?

Rocket Lab said on 26 September 2026 that “another 14 launches remain on schedule to deliver the rest of Synspective’s constellation to space by the end of the decade.” Synspective’s stated goal, on its launch mission page, is a constellation of 30 SAR satellites by the end of the 2020s.

The Electron bookings rest on two multi-launch contracts. The first, signed in Tokyo on 18 June 2024, covered ten launches across 2025 to 2027 and was then Rocket Lab’s largest Electron agreement. The second, announced on 29 September 2025, added ten more and took Synspective’s upcoming Electron missions to 21, which Rocket Lab called “the largest order of dedicated Electron missions with a single customer to date”.

Synspective has also turned to a second launcher. On 18 September 2026 it signed with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to put two StriX satellites on Japan’s H3 rocket in 2027, from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center, under Japan’s government Space Strategy Fund.

A third of Rocket Lab’s launches this year carried a StriX

Six of Rocket Lab’s 18 launches in 2026 have carried a StriX satellite: flights in March, May and June, then three in September. Synspective’s launch notices cover all six, and Electron has carried every one of its 13 satellites since the first, StriX-α, in December 2020.

Rocket Lab calls Electron the primary launch vehicle for iQPS of Fukuoka, another Japanese radar constellation. Electron’s 93rd flight, on 20 August, carried the ninth QPS-SAR satellite Rocket Lab has deployed, and nine more iQPS launches are booked on Electron to 2030. Iridium’s shareholders voted on 24 September 2026 to approve Rocket Lab’s takeover of the satellite operator.

Synspective has now launched 13 StriX satellites towards its target of 30, every one from Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula, and its next 14 are booked from the same site.