Monday, November 26, 2018

Spaceflight's First Dedicated Satellite Launch Mission Aimed At Wednesday

Seattle-based Spaceflight, which helps organize and arrange flights to space for "small satellites" and Cubesats, will see its first, dedicated mission to space on Wednesday, if all goes well. The Spaceflight SSO-A: SmallSat Express is currently slated to launch from Southern California on Wednesday, on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, from Vandenberg Air Force Base. SmallSat Express is a collection of 64 "cubesat" satellites, collected together by space ride arranger Spaceflight, for over 35 customers. The payload includes University of North Carolina-Wilmington, NovaWurks, Ghalam, Helios Wire / Sirion Global, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok (KMUTNB), Astrocast, Honeywell Aerospace, HawkEye 360, Nevada Museum of Art, Fleet Space Technologies, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Audacy, Capella Space Corporation, University of Colorado Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and many others. The dedicated small satellite ridesharing spacecraft is the first contracted by Seattle-based Spaceflight, which has normally been helping to arrange rides to space for those small satellites as "add-on" missions behind primary launch customers on a variety of rocket platforms, including those from SpaceX.