A few hours after the space flight took off from California, Elon Musk took to X, formerly Twitter, to announce that with this “Falcon has delivered over 1000 tonnes to orbit this year, a world record”.
In another post, Musk claimed that SpaceX’s delivery could only be followed by the Soviet Union at its “peak” and in modern times can be compared to China — which he said has only undertaken one fourth of the payload.
“This is significantly more than any country has launched with their entire rocket fleet in a year. Second is peak Soviet Union at ~500 tonnes.”
“For a present day comparison, the rest of the world has delivered ~250 tonnes to orbit so far this year, mostly by China.”
The space ‘rideshare’
The Transporter-9 was launched by SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:49 am local time (1:49 pm EST; 1849 GMT) on November 11.
As per SpaceX mission details, this was “the 12th launch and landing of this Falcon 9 stage booster.”
The 90 payloads included CubeSats, MicroSats, and orbital transfer vehicles, which, according to the mission description, will deploy more spacecraft at a later stage.
“During this mission, 90 payloads were expected to deploy from Falcon 9 across 89 deployments, and 86 deployments have been confirmed,” added the mission description on the SpaceX website.
Transporter 9, as per space.com, is SpaceX’s 82nd orbital mission this year. This year, the rocket maker has broken its own previous record of 61 launches — in 2022. While the mission’s 90 payloads are for sure hefty, Elon Musk’s company holds the record of sending 143 satellites to orbit — with its Transporter-1 mission in January 2021.
Credit: WION