Transporter-12: SpaceX Launches 131 Satellites On Rideshare Mission

A SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying 131 different payloads lifted off Tuesday at 1909 UTC from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the company's Transporter-12 rideshare mission. The rocket's reusable first stage booster landed back at Vandenberg's Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4), about 7.5 minutes after liftoff. This was SpaceX's 397th landing of an orbital class rocket, and second for this particular booster(B1088-2).

The Falcon 9 upper stage continued spaceward, with payload deployment sequence in orbit starting around 55 minutes after liftoff. The payloads will be deployed into low Earth orbit(LEO) over a roughly 90-minute stretch.

Thirty-seven of the 131 payloads going up today belong to San Francisco company Planet, which operates three constellations of Earth-observing satellites. Thirty-six of the 37 Planet craft are "SuperDove" cubesats, shoebox-sized craft that collect images with a resolution of about 10 feet (3 meters) per pixel. The other one is Pelican-2, whose resolution is about 7.5 times sharper than that.

"Additionally, Planet has collaborated with NVIDIA to equip Pelican-2 with the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics to power on-orbit computing — with the aim of vastly reducing the time between data capture and its availability for customers," Planet wrote in a December 2024 statement. "Pelican-2 is designed to rapidly convert precise spatial data into near-real-time insights by utilizing AI-powered solutions for use cases including object detection, vegetation and crop type classification, and disaster response."

Tuesday's mission is the 12th in SpaceX's Transporter series, which launches satellites from a variety of customers on a single rocket. A record 143 payloads were launched in January 2021 on the Transporter 1 mission.

With Tuesday's launch, SpaceX has to date, launched 14 rideshare missions — 12 Transporter flights and two in a different program known as Bandwagon; in total deploying about 1,100 payloads for more than 130 different customers, according to the Elon Musk company.