LEO Express 4 Mission Updates
Mission Overview
LEO Express 4 is the fourth flight for Mira, Impulse’s highly agile spacecraft. We unveiled an upgraded Mira spacecraft on LEO Express 3; this mission will further validate its systems and capabilities. This will be an Impulse-only mission, with no customer payloads onboard, that puts the spacecraft fully through its paces ahead of future flights, testing across a range of new maneuvers and operating conditions.
Flying in a mid-inclination path in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), LEO Express 4 will expand Mira’s flight heritage while proving out the vehicle’s responsiveness and maneuverability in space. Delivered less than a year after the prior mission’s launch, LEO Express 4 also showcases Impulse’s ability to quickly ramp production while maintaining the highest level of quality, with multiple Mira vehicles in production at our Redondo Beach facility.
Mission Objectives include:
- Full Checkout for Upgraded Propulsion: Demonstrate complete capabilities of Mira’s increased delta-v across a range of maneuvers, including highly responsive thruster firings in quick succession
- Building Flight Heritage: Prove out the performance capabilities of upgraded systems on orbit
- Demoing New Advanced Systems: Additional avionics upgrades have been added for Mira since its last mission, and this flight will demonstrate their performance ahead of future customer launches
LEO Express 4 continues to build on Mira’s flight-proven capabilities to support a wide range of customer missions.
Mira Ready for Launch
The Mira spacecraft for LEO Express 4 is ready for launch! Our Launch Operations Team has completed final preparations at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and delivered the vehicle for final integration with a Falcon 9. The spacecraft will now be integrated alongside several others aboard SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission, manifested through Exolaunch. Launch is currently targeted for no earlier than October 2026.
LEO Express 4 reflects the speed and execution of teams across Impulse. In approximately 10 months, the team behind Mira went from mission inception to launch readiness, rapidly building, testing, and preparing the spacecraft for flight while maintaining the rigor and quality that Impulse is known for. That pace is enabled by Impulse’s vertically integrated approach and expert teams, who handle everything from engines, propulsion systems, avionics, actuators, and structures to spacecraft integration and system-level testing.
Next up: Launch and on-orbit operations, where LEO Express 4 will demonstrate a range of capabilities designed to support customers' most challenging missions.
Stay tuned for more mission updates.
