For the fourth time in 2023, SpaceX will launch a smallsat rideshare mission to low Earth orbit with a large number of payloads. The Transporter-9 mission is ready to launch during a 55-minute window starting at 10:49 a.m. PST (18:49 UTC) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
SpaceX said the launch will include 113 payloads, 90 of which shall be deployed directly from the Falcon 9 rocket. The opposite 23 satellites will deploy from orbital transfer vehicles at a later time.
![](https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Transporter-9_small.jpg)
The plurality of the payloads come from Earth commentary company, Planet Labs PBC. The San Francisco-based company is sending up 36 more of its SuperDove satellites, which add to a roster of greater than 500 currently on orbit. It’s also launching a technology demonstration satellite called “Pelican-1,” which can “host Planet’s next generation of imaging sensors, to be deployed as a part of the Pelican and Tanager constellations.”
The mission comes at the top of per week where SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites and a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. It also comes a day before the corporate prepares to launch two more satellites on behalf of Luxembourg-based satellite company, SES.
The Transporter-9 mission will lift off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E), after which, the primary stage booster, tail number B1071, will return to VSFB for a touchdown at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4).
This shall be the twelfth mission for B1071 after flying Transporter-8, two missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, NROL-87 and NROL-85, German radar-imaging satellite SARah-1, the NASA-French ocean research satellite SWOT, plus six Starlink delivery flights.
Earth observations and technology demonstrations
Starting just over 54 minutes into the mission, SpaceX will start deploying the rideshare payloads, starting with a batch of 11 payloads manifested by German company, Exolaunch.
First up shall be certainly one of three satellites from Canadian company, GHGSat: GHGSat-C9 “Juba.” It together with GHGSat-C10 “Vanguard” and GHGSat-11 “Elliot” were named after the youngsters of company employees and are designed to observe emissions. The corporate claims that GHGSat-10 will develop into “the world’s first industrial CO2 monitoring payload.”
Also onboard the flight is Djibouti-1A, a satellite designed to “transmit data by the meteorological station of the Djibouti Center for Study and Research (CERD) to the Missions Control Center positioned in Djibouti, and supply the essential tools to maintain track of the changes in water resources by providing country-wide, real-time data,” in accordance with the publican Space in Africa.
![](https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/20201015_FalconSAT-X_assembly_small.jpg)
The ultimate payload that may deploy nearly and hour-and-a-half into the mission is FalconSAT-X, a satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy. The Air Force describes the FalconSAT program as “as a tutorial platform for an array of aerospace industry and Defense Department experiments.”