SpaceX launched its Transporter-9 mission on Saturday (Nov. 11), a ‘rideshare’ flight that lofted 90 payloads into orbit.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California’s Vandenberg House Power Base at 1:49 p.m. EST (1849 GMT; 10:49 a.m. native California time), kicking off the Transporter-9 mission.
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The Falcon 9’s first stage got here again to Earth for a vertical landing at Vandenberg about 7.5 minutes after liftoff. It was the twelfth launch and touchdown for this specific booster, in response to a SpaceX mission description.
The mission carried 90 payloads for a wide range of totally different prospects, “together with cubesats, microsats, and orbital switch autos carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time,” the mission description reads.
These payloads might be deployed into low Earth orbit between 54 and 85.5 minutes after liftoff, in response to the mission description.
Ninety is a hefty quantity to make sure, nevertheless it is not near a file. SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission holds the mark, sending 143 satellites to orbit in January 2021. And Transporter-6, which lifted off this previous January, was additionally extra prolific, carrying 114 satellites aloft.
Transporter-9 is the 82nd orbital mission for SpaceX in 2023, extending the corporate’s file for a single 12 months. (The earlier mark, 61 launches, was set in 2022.) Most of this 12 months’s missions have been dedicated to constructing out Starlink, SpaceX’s web megaconstellation, which presently include more than 5,000 operational satellites.
