Click here to Join L2 Bandwagon-2 is scheduled for launch less than eight hours after a mission for Astranis is due to lift off from Florida, making it SpaceX’s 131st Falcon mission of 2024, with five more scheduled for the remainder of December. After having a slower third quarter with only 27 launches, this is already the 39th in the fourth quarter of the year. The next SpaceX flight is expected to carry Starlink satellites early Monday morning from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The next rideshare flight will be Transporter 12 in January to Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). Mission Overview Bandwagon-2 is SpaceX’s second dedicated rideshare flight to a mid-inclination orbit, which keeps the satellites over more highly populated areas of the planet rather than providing the full global coverage of near-polar orbits targeted by Transporter missions. The first four Bandwagon missions are expected to each carry a South Korean earth observation satellite at the top of the payload stack. As with the Transporter flights, payload integration companies handle many of the satellites going onto the stack. For this flight, Exolaunch is supporting 15 CubeSats and 7 larger microsatellites. (CubeSat sizes are typically given in terms of 10 cm cubes, with a 6U CubeSat being approximately 30 x 20 x 10 cm.) Maverick Space is also involved, while Arrow Science and Technology has a 16U CubeSat deployer on board, although no details of its contents have been announced prior to launch. Render of SAR satellite for 425 Project. (Credit: Thales Alenia Space) In December 2023, SpaceX launched the first of five satellites for South Korea’s 425 Project, a constellation of military Earth observation satellites. While that first satellite, which was declared operational in August, had an optical imaging payload, the remaining four use synthetic aperture radar (SAR). These radar satellites are able to obtain images in darkness or through clouds, complementing the abilities of optical imaging spacecraft. Thales Alenia Space announced in December 2018 that it had signed two contracts with Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) and Hansha Systems Corporation to develop high-resolution SAR satellites for Korea’s Agency for Defence Development. Thales Alenia is providing the radar-imaging payloads and elements of the system for pointing the spacecraft. The SAR payload uses a deployable 5-meter antenna. Bandwagon-2 is carrying the second of the 425 Project SAR satellites. This follows the program’s first SAR satellite, which was deployed during Bandwagon-1 earlier this year, with the next of these satellites expected to be aboard Bandwagon-3. Other expected payloads Other payloads aboard the Bandwagon-2 mission include the X47 and X49 satellites, each with a mass around 90 kg, to expand ICEYE’s SAR imaging constellation, joining those launched on previous rideshares. ICEYE recently announced a new funding round that brought its total amount raised in 2024 to $158 million. HawkEye 360 satellites use a variety of antennas to monitor different frequency ranges. Credit: Hawkeye 360 Hawkeye 360 has Cluster-11, a trio of microsatellites each with a mass of 30 kg, aboard the rocket. These will fly in formation to locate the source of radio-frequency (RF) transmissions on Earth. Tomorrow.io has Tomorrow-S3 and S4 aboard, a pair of 6U CubeSats with microwave sounder payloads to collect weather data. Sidus Space is launching its second mission, LizzieSat-2, which has a mass of approximately 100 kg. This spacecraft hosts instruments such as imagers and edge computing, including HEO’s Holmes-004 imager that will be used to observe other objects in orbit. True Anomaly’s 275-kg Jackal 3/TAANSAAFL-002 mission will demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) and non-Earth imaging (NEI) functions. True Anomaly’s first pair of satellites, launched on Transporter 10 in March, failed shortly after deployment. GITAI has SC1, a 16U CubeSat, which will test a new spacecraft bus and instrument suite. SC1 with deploy a tethered target and then observe it with cameras, LiDAR, and a laser rangefinder, processing the data with visual recognition software. Think Orbital’s Flight-2 will conduct a demonstration of electron beam welding, cutting, and x-ray inspection on a piece of metal, then transmit the resulting data back to Earth and shut down within about a day of launch. This is the company’s first free-flying orbital mission, using a 39-kg satellite, following up on an earlier demonstrator that stayed attached to a Falcon 9 first stage. Xplore’s 6U CubeSat XCUBE-1 (6U) is the first mission for its operator, carrying a hyperspectral imager. Djibouti’s second satellite, DJIBOUTI-B, is a 1U CubeSat with an Internet of Things (IoT) communications payload to gather data from climatological stations in the country. Space Telecommunications Inc. (STI) has an 8U CubeSat, CTC-0, aboard which will test direct-to-device communications and blockchain technologies. CroCube, a 1U CubeSat, is a demonstration mission with a camera and a microcontroller payload and will be Croatia’s first CubeSat mission. LASARSat. Credit: Karel Horák LASARSat, also a 1U CubeSat, is a Czech mission that includes sensors for detecting how much energy reaches the satellite from a laser passing through Earth’s atmosphere, as well as reflectors to aid in tracking. Pleiades-Orpheus, a CubeSat from the Irvington High School Girls in STEM Club! using the 1U platform developed by Cal-Poly Pomona, has an amateur radio payload. Mongolia’s ONDO Space has ONDOSAT-OWL-3 through 12, ten more of their 0.5U CubeSats for IoT communications. More payload information will be added as it becomes available. Notes on previous SpaceX rideshare missions Transporter-11: 113 objects are being tracked from this launch, with 12 of those still unidentified on Celestrak. Based on the expected payloads those 12 could be CAKRA-1, GNA-3, one of the Doves from Planet, and the nine PICo-IoT satellites. Bandwagon-1: All 11 expected objects are tracked and identified. Transporter-10: 51 objects are being tracked from this launch, with 13 of those still unidentified on Space-Track. SSO-A: Launched in December 2018, this rideshare organized by Spaceflight Inc. left two sizeable pieces of the payload stack in orbit. While the Upper Free Flyer is still at an altitude of approximately 560 x 540 km, the Lower Free Flyer reentered Earth’s atmosphere in early December. The Transporter-1 payload adapter is also still in orbit at 480 x 470 km. Later flights kept the rideshare stack attached to the second stage. (Lead image: Falcon 9 on the pad at Vandenberg before SDA Tranche 0 Flight 1 launch. Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF)