Elon Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX has launched its first mission of the year. The 229-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket shot up into space with a payload of 114 satellites that it will deliver into a polar orbit. Musk shared a video of the launch on his Twitter account.
The payload was from 23 different countries and is the second-highest number of satellites ever hauled on a single spacecraft. That record is held by another SpaceX launch that happened exactly a year ago when a SpaceX rocket took over 140 satellites to orbit.
The reusable rocket took off from launchpad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on January 3. It was the company’s 200th launch and 161st successful flight. The first stage of this particular Falcon 9 has been reused 15 times, a record for the company.
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The payload of the January 3 mission includes “CubeSats, microsats, picosats and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description. The payload comes from private companies like EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA) and San Francisco-based Planet.
Other customers came from countries like Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Kuwait, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay. The company charges $1.2 million for launching a payload of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) to orbit.
The mission will have 82 separation events in order to put the satellite constellations in the correct orbit. “We were able to confirm 77 of the 82 deployments. Because the spacecraft on this mission are small satellites, and because some of them deploy in close proximity to another, it can be difficult for us to confirm the deployments in real-time,” SpaceX operations engineer Siva Bharadvaj said.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
