While SpaceX rideshare missions are always chock-full of new tech headed to orbit, Friday’s Transporter-15 flight was busier than most. The launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California deployed 140 payloads, which is the second-largest haul since regular Transporter flights began in 2021.
Here’s a peek at what was on board:
Bird’s eye views: Like past rideshare missions, Transporter-15 carried dozens of EO sats intended to kickstart constellations—or build upon tech that’s already in orbit. Highlights of some sats hitching a ride include:
- 36 SuperDove birds and 2 Pelican sats from Planet Labs;
- Five SAR sats from ICEYE, giving enhanced EO capabilities to the Greek National Space Program, Polish military, and BAE System’s Azalea constellation;
- Three NewSat Mark-V sats from Satellogic;
- Eight Eaglet II satellites with hyperspectral imaging and automatic identification systems as part of Italy’s IRIDE national EO constellation;
- Three multispectral satellites by Scanway, which is setting up a national EO constellation for Poland;
- One Formosat satellite as part of Taiwan’s planed eight-sat, high-resolution EO constellation;
- The first climate monitoring EO satellite from a local government in Korea, called GyeonggiSat-1, which will monitor the region directly outside of Seoul.
Satception: The rise of spacetugs, orbital transfer vehicles, and reentry capsules means that some payloads had a connecting flight once SpaceX got them into orbit.
- Impulse Space’s Mira spacetug is hosting a non-Earth imaging camera from HEO, and tech demonstrations from Samara Aerospace, and Zenno Astronautics; it’s also deploying cubesats from FOSSA Systems using Exolaunch’s deployment system.
- Two orbital transfer vehicles from Italian startup D-Orbit are hosting payloads from ESA, Spire, Spaceium, Pale Blue, Planetek and StardustMe.
- Loft Orbital’s YAM-9 rideshare spacecraft is carrying a hyperspectral camera from Wyvern, as well as edge-compute technology to host virtual missions.
- Varda’s fifth reentry capsule, and fourth to fly this year, is carrying a US government payload as part of the Prometheus program to study materials performance at hypersonic speeds.
The future is now: Also on board the SpaceX rideshare are a few technologies that promise to bring humanity into a new digital age.
- Singaporean quantum comms company SpeQtral, along with the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, sent a satellite to demonstrate its quantum comms tech;
- Blockchain startup Spacecoin sent three 16U sats as part of a larger constellation to test Spacecoin’s decentralized satellite internet network;
- Open Cosmos launched its 6G Starlab satellite to support research into 6G space-to-ground connectivity with laser comms terminals.
