Transporter 4 rideshare mission

Transporter 4, SpaceX’s latest rideshare mission, launched today at 12:24pm EST from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s (CCSFS) LC-40. The Falcon 9 carried its 40 communications, technology & Earth observing satellites on a Southeast trajectory and eventually placed them in a polar orbit.

Booster B1061.7 landed a few minutes later on JRTI (Just Read the Instructions) drone ship just off the coast of the Bahamas roughly 330 miles downrange. This boosters first mission was for the Crew-1 mission on Nov 15^th of 2020.

This was SpaceX’s 4^th Transporter rideshare mission with the program beginning in January 2021. Its first Transporter mission contained 143 individual satellites to LEO making a still standing record for amount of satellites launched on one mission. While typically the Transporter mission returns to land at LZ1 at the Cape, Transporter 4 carried the EnMAP satellite which was the heaviest rideshare satellite to date and required extra boost time negating a landing back at the Cape.