SpaceX is preparing for its fourth launch of the year as part of its dedicated smallsat rideshare program, which is set to liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday.
The mission, dubbed Transporter-14, will send 70 customer payloads into a Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East is anticipated at at 2:18 p.m. PDT (5:18, p.m. EDT, 2118 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
In its announcement of this mission, SpaceX noted that it would be “keeping an eye on weather” as the planned launch approaches.
SpaceX will use the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1071, which will fly for a 26th time. It previously launched five missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, three of SpaceX’s rideshare missions and NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1071 will target a landing on the droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 138th booster landing for this vessel and the 466th Falcon landing for SpaceX.
Back again
Among the dozens of companies with their logos and spacecraft surrounding the deployment mechanisms on the Falcon 9 rocket is Berlin-based Exolaunch. The company, which helps manifest spacecraft onto these missions for its customers, has been a part of every Transporter mission to date as well as the Bandwagon missions, which head to mid-inclination orbits.
Exoluanch CEO Robert Sproles described SpaceX’s smallsat rideshare program as “industry enabling” and something “that our customers depend on, that we are very proud to support.”
“It gives an opportunity to really pressure test not only our hardware, but all of our systems and missions management to make this a very smooth process for our customers so that they have a really easy time,” Sproles said.
Transporter-14 represents the single, biggest mission for Exolaunch, which is managing 45 of the 70 payloads onboard. Those come from 25 customers from around the word, like Space Forge in the United Kingdom, Gilmour Space in Australia and Unseen Labs in France among others.
“When you have that many payloads on a mission, everything has to work like clockwork. So there’s a tremendous amount of prep work that goes into preparing for the launch campaign,” Sproles said. “Not that anybody does approach these with a laissez-faire attitude, but you cannot approach a Transporter mission without thinking through every activity and how you will accomplish this efficiently on site.”
Sproles said while there are some variations depending on the customer, typically two of the most important marker on the road to a mission are eight and four months away from launch day.
“L-8 months is one very, very big deadline where a lot of deliverables and configurations are due. So ideally, the customer has told us that they want the mission and that they will be ready for the mission by L-8 months,” Sproles said. “That doesn’t mean that’s the absolute latest. We are able to get customers on later than that. There’s usually less flexibility when that happens.”
He said four months from a mission launch it’s “rare” to be able to bring on a new payload for the mission, calling it a “worst case” scenario to try and join a mission.
Exolaunch’s most used product is its EXOpod, which has been a part of 29 missions and deployed 360 CubeSats to date. Other flight-proven deployment mechanisms include the CarboNIX, the EXOport and the Quadro Arrow.
The EXOpod is the simplest way to work with a CubeSat, since those are variations on a uniform spacecraft, just made up of multiple units, which are 10 cm cubed each.
Other more bespoke kinds of satellites that require a different separation system will result in a conversation between Exolaunch and the customer as to what makes the most sense for that satellite and the mission.
“Once, with the customer, we have down selected to the right separation system, we then take that to SpaceX and say, ‘Here is the interface that we would like to fly and here is the volume that we would like to purchase,” Sproles said. “So, we’ll purchase the capacity on volume and each volume comes with a mass allocation in it and then we’ll manage that, along with the customer.”
In May, Exolaunch announced a new, multi-year contract with SpaceX to extend its access to Transporter and other rideshare missions out through 2028. In its statement, Exolaunch said that will allow it access to not only SSO missions, but also mid-inclination, near-polar and dawn-dusk orbits as well.
“It gives our customers confidence and trust that when they put in not just the effort, but the funds to build their satellite, that they will have a reliable ride to orbit,” Sproles said. “Often, launch is one of the most expensive portions of their programs, but also time-to-revenue is what is important to the customer… Having these contracts locked in allows us to say to customers, ‘When you are ready, the launch will be there.’”
While this deal is expressly for future missions on the Falcon family of rockets, Sproles said Exolaunch is also in early talks with SpaceX about being a part of future commercial launches of its Starship rocket.
“Yes, absolutely. That’s a conversation we are engaged with them on,” Sproles said, adding that he couldn’t go into details like projected timelines or specific access to Starship. “Definitely, we’re in those conversations. Excited about them. Really excited to support future, commercial Starship launches.”
Sproles said with 16 launches remaining on their manifest for 2025, including Transporter-15, they have a busy year ahead for a company of roughly 70 people spread across multiple, international offices.
Last up, up top
Images of the fully integrated payload stack for the Transporter-14 mission show one spacecraft literally above all others. On its website, SpaceX refers to this position as the “Cake Topper” and it comes with a dedicated user’s guide, which was most recently updated in December 2024.
“[SpaceX] is pleased to offer a unique solution for small-to-medium-class spacecraft up to 2500 kg that wish to launch in a forward-mounted orientation,” the user’s guide states. “This offering combines the schedule assurances of the Rideshare Program with many of the capabilities of primary, dedicated missions.”
SpaceX states that the Cake Topper has a typical timeline of one to two years from contract to launch.
The Cake Topper for Transporter-14 is the Mission Possible capsule from The Exploration Company (TEC). It will be the last payload deployed, releasing nearly 2 hours and 45 minutes after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
It’s the second development mission for the Germany-based company, which aims to create a cargo transport vehicle, called Nyx Earth. It also has plans to create a crewed variation of Nyx Earth in the future as well as a lunar variant, called Nyx Moon.
In a post on its LinkedIn page, TEC said the capsule took about three years to develop, manufacture and test for a cost of about €35 million (~$40 million).
TEC said this will be the third controlled reentry vehicle developed in Europe to date, preceded by the Advanced Reentry Demonstrator in 1998 and the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle in 2015, which were both developed by the European Space Agency.
The launch of the Mission Possible capsule comes after its first spacecraft, dubbed Mission Bikini, launched as a payload onboard the inaugural launch of an Ariane 6 rocket in July 2024. However, an upper stage failure prevented that capsule from performing its reentry demonstration.
Mission Possible, weighing in at 1.6 tons with a max diameter of 2.5 meters (8.2 ft), carries with it 25 payloads. It’s designed to perform tests through five “critical phases” of the mission, according to TEC:
- In-orbit payload activation
- Separation from the launch vehicle
- Attitude control
- Atmospheric reentry
- Splashdown with ocean recovery
TEC said it’s using parachutes from the company Airborne Systems, which were previously used on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. As part of their method to reduce costs on this mission, a drop test using the parachutes was not performed.
It also decided to use commercial off-the-shelf components for the Mission Possible flight computer as well as opt for no redundancy on critical subsystems, like relying on one parachute and only having one onboard computer.
“We are aware this model means more risks of failure, but it allows for lower costs, faster development, and a deeper understanding of the vehicles and their systems over time,” TEC wrote on LinkedIn. “We aim to learn quickly by building fast, flying early and improving with each iteration.”
