Transporter-18: SpaceX Launches Google AI Satellite, 129 Payloads In Rideshare Mission

SpaceX Falcon 9 launched its Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1832 UTC on Thursday (Oct. 1), deploying 130 payloads into a sun-synchronous orbit. The mission’s primary payload was a prototype satellite for Google’s Project Suncatcher, designed to test the resilience of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) against space radiation and thermal challenges.

About 8 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9's first stage booster, B1082 came back to Vandenberg for a landing, completing its 25th flight to date. Meanwhile the rocket's upper stage powered its way to low Earth orbit (LEO), where it deployed the 130 payloads over a roughly 11-minute window starting about 54.5 minutes after liftoff, and bringing the total count for SpaceX’s Rideshare program to over 1,800 payloads.

The highest-profile payload on Transporter-18, is a pathfinder spacecraft for Project Suncatcher, the AI constellation that Google plans to build and operate in LEO, which explores scalable machine learning infrastructure.

This satellite will help the project team determine how 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. The manifest included Carbon Mapper’s Tanager-2 satellites for methane monitoring, and spacecraft from Varda Space Industries featuring reentry vehicles.

Transporter-18 was part of a very busy day for SpaceX. The company also launched the Crew-13 astronaut mission for NASA earlier, and it aims to launch the NROL-97 flight for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office later.