SpaceX Closes Out June With an 88-Satellite Rideshare and a Homecoming Landing
Transporter-2 launched 88 satellites and stuck SpaceX's first onshore booster landing of 2021, capping an eventful month.
SpaceX wrapped up an already packed June with one more launch today: Transporter-2, the second dedicated rideshare mission under its SmallSat Rideshare Program, lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying 88 small satellites. That’s 85 commercial and government payloads bundled onto a single Falcon 9, plus three more Starlink satellites tagging along. If you’ve been following the rideshare program since it launched earlier this year, this is exactly the model SpaceX is betting on: instead of a smallsat operator waiting months (or paying a premium) for a dedicated launch, you buy a slot on a scheduled bus and split the cost with dozens of other customers.
What I find more interesting than the satellite count, honestly, is where the booster ended up. The Falcon 9’s first stage came back down at Landing Zone 1, marking SpaceX’s first onshore landing of the year. Every recovery so far in 2021 has been out on the droneships — Just Read the Instructions or Of Course I Still Love You, bobbing somewhere in the Atlantic. Onshore landings depend on trajectory and how much fuel margin is left for the boostback burn, so they tend to happen on lighter-payload or specific-orbit missions where the booster doesn’t need to conserve as much propellant for a downrange landing. Seeing one today is a nice signal that SpaceX had the performance margin to bring it home rather than out to sea.
A rideshare model that’s actually working
It’s worth stepping back and appreciating how routine this is starting to feel. A year or two ago, “88 satellites on one rocket” would’ve been a headline in itself. Now it’s just Tuesday for SpaceX’s manifest. The rideshare program is clearly succeeding at what it set out to do: democratize access to orbit for smaller players — university cubesats, startups testing IoT constellations, government agencies that don’t need or want a dedicated launch vehicle. Between Transporter-1 back in January and this mission, SpaceX has now put well over 100 rideshare payloads into orbit in under six months.
It’s also a reminder of just how busy this month has been for the company. Between CRS-22 to the ISS, a GPS III satellite for Space Force, and now Transporter-2, SpaceX has been launching at a pace that would’ve seemed unthinkable for a single operator a few years back. Falcon 9 reuse is clearly the backbone of that cadence — you don’t get four-plus launches in a month if you’re building a new first stage every time.
And in a fittingly odd bit of tech news to close out the month: Tim Berners-Lee auctioned off the original source code for the World Wide Web as an NFT, and it sold for $5.4 million. Different corner of tech entirely, but it’s a strange sign of the times that the code behind the web itself is now also a collectible. Two very different stories about how we’re building and monetizing infrastructure, both landing on the same day.