On June 30 at 19:31 UTC, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Booster 1060 launched the Smallsat Transporter 2 mission from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Instead of taking the usual trajectory to the east that is used to achieve an equatorial orbit after liftoff, this Falcon 9 headed south-southeast to a polar orbit in a dogleg maneuver that skirted the Florida coast. And instead of landing on a barge, the first stage flipped around and reignited its engines opposite the direction of travel to head back to the launch site. Booster 1060 successfully landed at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, thus completing its eighth flight.

Once in orbit, the Falcon 9 second stage began the orderly process of deploying the satellites in such a way that they wouldn’t hit each other later. This was a carefully coordinated dance of separation after separation that lasted 30 minutes.

Like other rideshare launches, SpaceX included some of its own Starlink satellites on the mission. This time there were only three Starlinks among the 88 total payloads on the rocket.

We have a lot of launches to cover this week so unfortunately, we don’t have time to talk about all 88 payloads. But there were a couple that caught our attention: Ghalib and QMR-KWT.

Ghalib by Marshall Intech is a 2U CubeSat designed to monitor the migration of falcons in the United Arab Emirates for conservation purposes. The satellite has a radio receiver and a small camera to accomplish this mission. If this demonstration is successful, Marshall Intech plans a full constellation of six CubeSats to track migratory birds worldwide.

The QMR-KWT CubeSat is the first satellite from the State of Kuwait. It was built for students for the “Code in Space” initiative. Students can submit code to be uploaded and run on the satellite. The satellite was built by Kuwaiti company Orbital Space who posted the technical details needed to send and receive data from the satellite online.

More Information

SpaceX mission page (archive)

ISISpace press release

UAE press release

Ghalib info page (ISISpace)

QMR-KWT info page (Orbital Space)

Launch video