SpaceX launched 30 satellites to orbit early Saturday morning (Dec. 21).
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday at 6:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT; 3:34 a.m. native California time), kicking off a rideshare mission SpaceX calls Bandwagon-2.
Thirty satellites went up on Bandwagon-2, together with payloads for South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development in addition to “Arrow Science and Technology, Exolaunch, HawkEye 360, Maverick Space Systems, Sidus Space, Tomorrow Companies Inc., True Anomaly and Think Orbital,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description.
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SpaceX has launched one Bandwagon mission already — Bandwagon-1, which despatched up 11 satellites this previous April. The firm additionally launches different rideshare missions with a sequence it calls “Transporter.”
SpaceX has launched 11 Transporter missions up to now. The first one, which flew in January 2021, lofted 143 satellites to orbit, a single-launch report that also stands.
As to plan on Saturday, the Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth about eight minutes after launch, touchdown vertically again at Vandenberg.
It was the twenty first flight for this specific booster, in accordance with the SpaceX mission description. That’s simply three away from the corporate’s rocket-reuse report.
SpaceX didn’t give a timeline for the deployment of the 30 satellites.
