New York, USA (CU)_ Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Sunday launched the Transporter-1 mission which carried 143 satellites into orbit, making history of highest number of satellites flown on a single rocket. The Transporter-1 mission carried 143 commercial and government satellites which included 10 satellites for the Starlink internet network of SpaceX and over 130 satellites for many other customers such as Planet, which operates an Earth-imaging satellite constellation, and ICEYE, which develops small radar satellites that are used for monitoring ice and flood tracking. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched on Sunday at 10 am Eastern Time from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The previous record of carrying the highest number of satellites on a single rocket was held by the Indian rocket PSLV, which carried 104 satellites in a mission in 2017. The Transporter-1 mission from SpaceX was the first in the latest rideshare program announced in 2019 by SpaceX. During the time, it was announced by the company that they would devote regularly scheduled launches of its Falcon 9 rocket workhorse to carrying large batches of small satellites, or smallsats, rather than concentrating on one large, primary payload.
In the recent years, smallsats have gained huge popularity. They range in size from a small smartphone to a big refrigerator. As they have become more sophisticated, numerous companies have entered the market promising to provide services using emerging technologies. Many new rocket companies are paying attention in building scaled-down rockets that can provide quick and easy launches for smallsats. The companies such as Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit have successfully launched their downsized rockets to orbit and started commercial operations.
The Falcon 9 rockets of SpaceX are bigger than the rockets of Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit and are usually used to launch heavy communications or spy satellites or Dragon spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, carrying astronauts and cargo. However, as the number of devices in orbit increases, experts are highly worried about congestion. Satellites have previously crashed in space, and while such collisions may not pose much of a danger to people on the ground, the crash debris can remain in orbit for years or decades to come.
