SpaceX launched 130 payloads to orbit today (Oct. 1), including a prototype Google AI satellite, on the second leg of a planned spaceflight tripleheader.
The rideshare mission, called Transporter-18, lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 2:32 p.m. EDT (1832 GMT; 11:32 a.m. local California time), rising through the fog that typically blankets this scenic coastal site.
Everything went according to plan on the flight. The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Vandenberg for a landing about 7.5 minutes after liftoff, completing its 25th flight to date. And the rocket's upper stage powered its way to low Earth orbit (LEO), where it deployed the 130 payloads over a roughly 11-minute stretch starting 54.5 minutes after launch.
The highest-profile payload it carried up is a pathfinder spacecraft for Project Suncatcher, the AI constellation that Google plans to build and operate in LEO.
This satellite will help the project team determine how tensor processing units (TPUs) — Google chips that are core Suncatcher hardware — perform in the space environment. Of particular importance are how the TPUs withstand space radiation, and how efficiently the heat they generate is dissipated.
Another company with AI data center ambitions flew on Transporter-18 as well: Cowboy Space put its Reason-1 satellite on the Falcon 9.
"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said of Reason-1 in a Sept. 28 X post. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins."
Transporter-18 also launched Starfish Space's first Otter servicing satellite.
"This is a big moment for Starfish Space," the Washington-based company said via X on Sept. 24. "We've spent years developing, iterating, and proving out the key technologies required for affordable, available satellite servicing. Now we’re launching Otters, putting our satellite servicing vehicles to work for customers in orbit."
The rest of the 130 payloads were a diverse lot, consisting of "cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads and two spacecraft with reentry vehicles and four orbital transfer vehicles carrying 41 of those payloads to be deployed at a later time," SpaceX wrote in its Transporter-18 mission description.
Transporter-18 didn't set a record for most payloads launched at once, but it came close. The current mark is 143, sent on SpaceX's Transporter-1 mission in January 2021.
Transporter-18 was part of a very busy day for SpaceX. The company also launched the Crew-13 astronaut mission for NASA this morning, and it aims to loft the NROL-97 flight for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office late tonight, both of them from Florida's Space Coast. Crew-13 flew on a Falcon 9, and NROL-97 will ride a Falcon Heavy to orbit.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:50 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1 with news of successful launch and rocket landing, then again at 4:35 p.m. EDT with news of payload deployment.
