On the evening of June 28, SpaceX launched another set of American reconnaissance satellites. The Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base at 11:14 PM ET this evening (June 29, 8:14 PM CST; 3:14 AM GMT).

The Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth about 8 minutes after liftoff tonight as planned, landing on the SpaceX Of Course I Still Love You drone ship parked in the Pacific Ocean. This was the eighth launch and landing for that launch vehicle, according to SpaceX’s mission statement.

NRO, which builds and operates the United States’ fleet of reconnaissance satellites, named its current mission NROL-186. This was the second project dedicated to creating a new “distributed architecture” of the agency.

The network would consist of “multiple small satellites designed to provide capability and endurance,” the NRO wrote in its NROL-186 mission statement. This is a departure from the traditional U.S. spy satellite strategy, which relies on large, high-capacity spacecraft that are expensive and time-consuming to develop and build.

We don’t know exactly what the NROL-186 satellites will do, what they can do; NRO releases few details about the spacecraft and its activities. We also haven’t seen them emerge; SpaceX stopped the webcast immediately after the Falcon 9 landing at the request of the NRO.