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SpaceX launches Sirius XM radio satellite to orbit, lands rocket on ship at sea (photos)

a black and white rocket launches into a dark night sky

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the SXM-10 satellite for SiriusXM from Florida on June 7, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX launched the SXM-10 satellite for SiriusXM early Saturday morning (June 7), adding another spacecraft to the company's broadcasting constellation.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying SXM-10 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday at 12:54 a.m. EDT (0454 GMT).

The rocket's first stage came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes later as planned, touching down on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

a boxy satellite deploys from its rocket's upper stage in earth orbit

It was the eighth launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

Among its previous missions were the Crew-9 and Fram2 astronaut flights and the liftoff on Jan. 15 of this year that sent two private moon landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience — toward Earth's nearest neighbor.

Blue Ghost aced its lunar touchdown on March 2, but Resilience crashed during its landing attempt on Thursday (June 5).

The Falcon 9's upper stage carried SXM-10 to geosynchronous transfer orbit high above Earth on Saturday, deploying it there about 33 minutes after launch as planned.

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The 14,100-pound (6,400 kilograms) satellite, which was built by Maxar Technologies, will now maneuver to join SiriusXM's radio constellation, adding its own capabilities to the mix.

Saturday's launch was SpaceX's second for SiriusXM in just six months; a Falcon 9 lofted the SXM-9 satellite in early December 2024.

SpaceX has now launched 69 Falcon 9 missions in 2025. Fifty-one of them have been dedicated to building out the company's Starlink broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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