SpaceX launched an epic rideshare mission into space today (August 16).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 116 different satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:56 p.m. EDT (6:56 p.m. GMT; 11:56 a.m. local time) as part of the company’s Transporter 11 mission.
The Falcon 9’s first stage landed near the launch site about eight minutes after liftoff, according to a broadcast on X (formerly Twitter). SpaceX is expected to confirm the payload deployment later today.
Related: SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches two Maxar satellites into space on record-breaking flight (video)
Transporter 11 contains a number of payloads from different companies. For example, one of the payloads is an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX chip. The chip is a well-known graphics processing unit (GPU) for artificial intelligence and edge computing.
The GPU will be shielded with a nanoparticle-enriched polymer made by the Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC), a spin-off of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. The university has already conducted a test on the International Space Station, but Transporter 11 will be the first time it shields real hardware during a space mission.
SpaceX has already launched four more missions in the past week, two of which aimed to send more satellites into space for the Starlink mega-constellation.
The Transporter 11 launch will be SpaceX’s 80th launch in 2024, with more than 70% of the satellites dedicated to Starlink.
This article was updated at 1:10 p.m. EDT with a slightly adjusted launch time posted by SpaceX on its website, again immediately after the successful launch.
