SpaceX Launches 131 Satellites on Transporter 12 Today

SpaceX is launching a new batch of satellites from California today (Jan. 14). A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to carry 131 payloads into orbit on the Transporter 12 mission, with a launch window opening at 1:49 p.m. EST (1849 GMT; 10:49 a.m. local time in California) from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Although 131 payloads is a large number, it doesn’t break the record of 143 payloads, which SpaceX set in January 2021 with the Transporter 1 mission.

The mission will be webcast live on X (formerly Twitter), starting about 10 minutes before liftoff. Transporter 12 is the 12th mission in SpaceX’s Transporter series, designed to launch a variety of satellites from different customers on a single rocket.

Among the 131 payloads, 37 are from Planet, a company based in San Francisco. These include 36 SuperDove cubesats, which have a resolution of about 10 feet (3 meters) per pixel, and one Pelican-2 satellite, which provides even sharper imagery. The Pelican-2 is equipped with NVIDIA’s Jetson platform for on-orbit AI computing, which helps process spatial data quickly for applications like disaster response and crop classification.

After launch, the Falcon 9’s upper stage will deploy the payloads into low Earth orbit over about 90 minutes. The rocket’s first stage will return to land at Vandenberg around 7.5 minutes after liftoff.

This will be the second flight of this Falcon 9 booster, which previously launched the NROL-126 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office in November 2024.