On January 24 at 15:00 UTC, SpaceX launched the Transporter 1 mission from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission was the fifth launch of Booster 1058, which previously launched the Crew Demo-2 mission and SpaceX CRS-21, among others.

For those of you keeping score at home: Booster 1058 successfully landed on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You positioned off of the Bahamas. Both fairings for the flight were brand new. No catch attempt was planned, but Ms Tree and Ms Chief successfully recovered both fairing halves from the water.

This particular Falcon 9 launched into a polar sun-synchronous orbit, an orbit where the satellite passes over a given location at the same local mean solar time each day. In the sixty years of launching rockets from Cape Canaveral, this is only the second rocket to do so. The first one was SAOCOM-1B back in August 2020, also on a Falcon 9. Previously, rockets were restricted from launching south due to the risk of rockets falling on the islands downrange and injuring someone. 

The reason why the Falcon 9 is permitted to launch this way because of its Autonomous Flight Termination System, which enables quicker destruction of the rocket by putting the computer brains in control of the self-destruct button rather than relying on a human sitting in launch control. It may sound a little scary — allowing a rocket to blow itself up — but if something goes wrong, every second counts and the delay of receiving and processing the telemetry from the rocket and transmitting a self-destruct command might make all the difference.

A photo of the Transporter-1 payload stack shared by a SpaceX staff photographer potentially revealed a new feature on this mini-batch of Starlinks — hardware for inter-satellite laser links.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to confirm that was the case. The inter-satellite laser link is key to the Starlink system because instead of sending a packet from a customer to a satellite to a ground station to another satellite, the packet can go from customer to satellite to another satellite in the network and so on until it goes back down to Earth at the destination. This reduces the network latency. According to Musk, all of the satellites launched in 2022 will have laser links; these ten are development models.

These are the first Starlink satellites to be deployed into a polar orbit. With their laser communication links, they should be able to provide coverage farther north and south than the current Starlink constellation does by relaying data from one satellite to the next via laser until it reaches a Starlink that is over one of the ground stations. This is a prelude to providing Internet service in extreme northern and southern locations where high-speed Internet is often either not available or not affordable.

Transporter-1 carried 143 satellites into orbit, the most ever carried into space on one rocket. The previous record was 104 satellites, launched on India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle C37 mission in December 2017. 133 of the spacecraft on the Transporter-1 were commercial and government payloads, while the remaining ten were SpaceX’s own Starlink satellites.

Like the Starlinks onboard, quite a few of the satellites were additions to existing constellations, like Planet’s SuperDove, Swarm’s SpaceBEE, and Spire’s Lemur-2.

There isn’t time to talk about each and every one of the 143 satellites, so I figured I’d pick a few to share with you.

First: NASA’s V-R3x satellites. They were unique because they didn’t deploy with the rest of the satellites. Instead, they were deployed from the aft — or lower — fuel dome of the second stage. This is a common practice on the Centaur upper stage on ULA’s Atlas V, but happens infrequently on Falcon 9. The V-R3x swarm of three satellites will demonstrate autonomous radio networking and navigation.

Another notable satellite on Transporter-1 is NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator-1 (PTD-1), which is testing a propulsion system with a water-based propellant system called Hydros developed by Tethers Unlimited of Bothell, Washington, as part of NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites 35 mission.

Onboard this tiny satellite are the bits needed to communicate with the ground, the bits needed to move around in space, some solar panels, and a tank of water. According to NASA: PTD-1’s propulsion system will produce gas propellants – a mix of hydrogen and oxygen – from water, only when activated in orbit. The system applies an electric current through water to chemically separate water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gases, in a process called electrolysis. 

The CubeSat’s solar arrays harness energy from the Sun to supply the electric power needed to operate the miniature electrolysis system.

Hydrogen and oxygen are not usually allowed on CubeSats due to the danger to other payloads on a rideshare mission. However, because they start as water and are only converted to hydrogen and oxygen on orbit, it wasn’t a hazard during launch.

Developing innovative propulsion systems like these for use on CubeSats will help them maintain orbit, maneuver to avoid other objects near them in space, and hasten de-orbit, helping to reduce an increasingly cluttered space environment.

A full list of satellites on the flight is available in the show notes for this episode on Dailyspace.org.

More Information

SpaceFlight Now article

Kepler 8-15 info page (Gunter’s Space Page)

Flock info page (Gunter’s Space Page)