Transporter-17: SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches 1st Nuclear-powered Satellite, 81 Payloads To Orbit

SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the Transporter-17 rideshare mission early Tuesday, (July 7) from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, deploying into Sun-Synchronous Orbit 81 payloads including the Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability (BOHR) satellite, the world's first commercially built nuclear-powered satellite which utilizes City Labs’ proprietary NanoTritium betavoltaic technology to generate electricity from radioactive decay.

As scheduled, Falcon 9’s first stage booster (B1097) landed on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, stationed in the Pacific Ocean, 8.5 minutes after liftoff. B1097 previously supported 10 missions: Sentinel-6B, Twilight, NROL-172 and 7 Starlink missions. The Payloads were deployed over roughly 2.5 hours, with the heaviest payload, South Korea’s CAS500-4 (~500 kg), requiring multiple upper-stage burns for precise orbital insertion.

CubeSat BOHR, Built by City Labs, tests a betavoltaic micropower source that converts beta particles from tritium decay into electricity. Unlike nuclear reactors, it produces no fission or chain reaction, offering continuous power for decades without sunlight.

“This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space,” said City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy in a statement.

Similar to how spacecraft like NASA's Voyager probes' radioisotope thermoelectric generators produce power from the heat emitted from their plutonium cores, City Lab's NanoTritium device harnesses the beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which can be converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor.

BOHR is designed as a pathfinder mission to test the feasibility of City Labs' new technology, which is meant to provide continuous power to spacecraft without a reliance on solar energy. The cubesat is still dependent on solar power for general operations — City Labs' technology could help introduce new vehicles capable of exploring places that current spacecraft can't operate for long periods of time, like permanently shadowed regions at the moon's poles.

With its abundance of water ice there and potential for extraction as a resource, the moon's south pole has become a focus as the target region for NASA's Artemis lunar landing mission as it's suited for long-term habitation of the moon. NASA is also actively funding the development of nuclear reactor technology to support that goal.

"City Labs’ BOHR arrives as the first commercial answer to that challenge," the company said in a statement. Though the cubesat's NanoTritium power source cannot produce nearly enough energy to power something like a moon base, City Labs sees its application scaling to eventually be able to do so.

One benefit of using tritium as the basis for a power system is the low radiation levels it emits. "City Labs’ tritium-based power systems… are engineered for safe handling, transportation, and integration within standard commercial launch environments," the company stated.

BOHR, and City Labs' tritium development, was funded under a Department of Defense contract. It's also the first nuclear-powered mission to be greenlit under the Federal Aviation Administration's nuclear launch approval under Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum-20, which was issued in 2019.

"BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment," Cabauy said.

Other notable payloads on Transporter-17 include the following.

FireSat: Three wildfire-detection satellites from Muon Space, backed by the Bezos Earth Fund, designed to detect fires at high resolution.

SAR and RF Detection: Four ICEYE synthetic aperture radar satellites and BRO-31 from Unseenlabs for maritime and all-weather observation.

Technology Demonstrators: Orbital Matter’s Replicator-2 spacecraft, which includes in-orbit 3D printers and foldable solar array tests; and SPEAR-1, a rapid technology transition demo for the Naval Research Laboratory.

International Contributions: Leonav-1 (UAE’s first PNT satellite), GRITSS (NASA/UMass Lowell sea level research), and academic payloads from Taiwan and Canada.

Transporter-17 marked SpaceX’s 79th Falcon 9 launch of 2026, pushing its cumulative rideshare payload count past 1,800. However, the program faces a supply crisis as SpaceX reportedly stopped accepting reservations for late 2028/early 2029, redirecting capacity toward Starlink, national security, and its own Starfall manufacturing program. This shift has created a gap in launch availability for smallsat operators, prompting launch competitors like Arianespace and SEOPS to develop alternative rideshare solutions.