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NEW YORK: A veteran rocket from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company has successfully launched the Transporter-1 mission, breaking the record for the most number of satellites ever flown on a single rocket.
The company’s Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with 143 commercial and government satellites on board. The previous record for the most satellites sent to space in one trip was held by an Indian rocket which carried 104 satellites in a 2017 launch.
The mission carried 10 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink internet network, and more than 130 satellites for a variety of customers including Planet, which operates a constellation of Earth-imaging satellites.
The satellites were launched into a sun-synchronous orbit, one that stays in constant daylight, about 500 kilometers above Earth’s surface. About eight minutes later, the bottom section of the rocket returned to Earth and landed in the Atlantic Ocean.
The launch was the first in SpaceX’s new Rideshare Program announced in 2019 and designed to launch many satellites at a time and enable organizations to reach space at a lower cost.
It cost just $1 million to place a satellite up to 200 kilograms on Transporter-1, and then $5,000 for every kilogram thereafter. The total mass of the satellites on board was about 5,000 kilograms.
