Tonight (April 7) SpaceX successfully completed an evening rocket landing just minutes after launching 11 satellites on its inaugural Bandwagon-1 class rideshare mission from Florida.
The 11-satellite Bandwagon-1 mission was launched tonight at 7:16 p.m. EDT (2316 GMT) by a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The spacecraft safely entered orbit, and SpaceX terminated its live broadcast early at the request of its client, South Korea, which conducted the mission using its Project 425 SAR synthetic aperture radar satellite, according to the article.
“On board this mission are 11 spacecraft including KOREA’s 425Sat, HawkEye 360’s Clusters 8 & 9, Tyvak International’s CENTAURI-6, iQPS’s QPS-SAR-7 TSUKUYOMI-II, Capella Space’s Capella-14, and Tata Advanced Systems Limited’s TSAT-1A,” SpaceX stated in its mission summary.
If all goes as planned, the first stage of the Falcon 9 made a vertical landing back on Earth approximately 7.5 minutes after liftoff. It landed at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, located door to KSC, at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 facility.
The mission description states that this was the booster’s 14th launch and landing.
Although this will be SpaceX’s maiden mission under its new Bandwagon program, rideshare missions are nothing new for the business.