SpaceX will attempt again Friday morning to launch 140 payloads on its Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The planned flight comes two days after SpaceX cleared the mission at the time when liquid oxygen loading on the rocket’s upper stage was to begin.
The flight of Transporter-15, the 19th mission of SpaceX’s Smallsat Rideshare program, is scheduled for 10:44 a.m. PST (1:44 a.m. EST/1844 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket will fly on a southern trajectory upon departure from Space Launch Complex 4 East.
Spaceflight Now’s live coverage will begin approximately 30 minutes before liftoff.
The Transporter-15 mission follows similar flights in January, March and June. SpaceX also launched the Bandwagon-3 and -4 rideshare missions to mid-inclination low Earth orbit in April and November.
SpaceX plans to launch the mission using an experienced Falcon 9 first stage booster with tail number B1071, one of the company’s most-flown rockets and marking its 30th flight.
It had previously flown five missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, four previous rideshare flights (three Transporters and one Bandwagon), and NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) missions.
Approximately 8.5 minutes after takeoff, the B1071 drone ship will make an autonomous landing, targeting touchdown on ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. If successful, it will be the 165th landing on this spacecraft and the 540th booster landing ever for SpaceX.
The deployment sequence will begin with the Toro2 spacecraft a little more than 54 minutes after liftoff and conclude approximately two hours later with NASA’s Realizing Rapid, Low-Cost High Risk Research (R5) CubeSat.
What’s on board?
One of the benefits of the rideshare program is that it offers payload providers multiple ways to take their spacecraft on a trip to space at a lower cost than a dedicated rocket launch. It also provides multiple lanes to deploy its satellites onto the rocket.
One of those players is Seps Space, which uses a variety of deployment mechanisms to host and deploy customer payloads, including its Equalizer Flex, Ghost Trap Deployer, and Keystone Separation System.
The Texas-based company is responsible for deploying 11 spacecraft on the Transporter-15 mission. These include four spacecraft of Alba Orbital (Hunity/NMMH-1, Sari-1, Sari-2 and Aniscat), three spacecraft of C3S (Wisdom-A, Wisdom-B and Mauve), three NASA-supported CubeSats (Triad-1, Triad-2 and 3UCubed-A) and Satrev’s PW-6U CubeSat.
“Every mission is different, and our strength lies in creating integration approaches for payloads that don’t fit into a one-size-fits-all model,” SAPS Chief Executive Officer Chad Brinkley said in a statement. “We are honored to support these organizations and the important work they are doing to advance science, technology and commercial innovation from space.”
Mercury One has been successfully integrated by ExoLaunch @spacex #Transporter15
Developed over 9 months of experimentation @proteus_space’s Mercury platform, it carries 4 payloads and will demonstrate new deployment mechanisms, an AI experiment, and a space qualification campaign. pic.twitter.com/yVuITYcaPI
– exolaunch (@exolaunch) 21 November 2025
Another major mission manager flying multiple customers is ExoLaunch, which will deploy 59 customer satellites from the Falcon 9 upper stage. Those payloads include Taiwan’s Tron Future Tech’s T.Microsat-1; SPiN-2, a European Space Agency-supported CubeSat built primarily by the Italian company Space Products & Innovation; and US-based CARE Weather’s Very-0G “Brandon” satellite.
At the top of the Transporter-15 stack, dubbed the ‘cake topper’ by SpaceX, is Taiwan Space Agency (TASA)’s Formosat-8 satellite. Also called Chi Po-lin or FS-8A, this satellite is the first in a planned eight-satellite constellation consisting of optical remote-sensing spacecraft.
TASA said it plans to launch these spacecraft annually, with the entire constellation deployed by 2031.
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