News
SpaceX announces Falcon 9 SmallSat Rideshare program with launches to start in 2020
Elon Musk’s private space venture, SpaceX, has announced that it is expanding its launch services to directly address the growing needs of small satellite operators. The company plans to accomplish this by introducing a SmallSat Rideshare program, which involves regularly scheduled, dedicated Falcon 9 missions whose prices could go as low as $2.25 million per customer for payloads up to 150 kg.
A look at SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare webpage notes that the missions will be to Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) for ESPA class payloads. What is quite unique about SpaceX’s newly-announced program is that unlike traditional rideshare models, these missions won’t be dependent on a Falcon 9’s primary payload. Instead, these SmallSat Rideshare missions will be pre-scheduled, allowing the missions to avoid delays with co-passengers.
SpaceX notes that payloads which run into development or production challenges leading up to their scheduled launch will be allowed to apply 100% of their payment towards the cost of rebooking. While rebooking fees will apply in this scenario, the system does provide SmallSat makers a way to avoid wasting their payments due to unforeseen or unfortunate delays.
Purchased 12 days or more before launch, the dedicated Falcon 9 SmallSat Rideshare missions will start at $2.25 million for payloads up to 150 kg on 15″ ESPA ports. Payloads up to 300 kilograms on 24″ ESPA ports start at $4.5 million. Each additional kg above the included mass will be charged $15,000. Purchased 12 to 6 days before launch, prices start at $3 million for payloads up to 150 kilograms on 15″ ESPA ports, while payloads on 24″ ESPA ports up to 300 kg will be charged $6 million. Payloads above the included mass would cost $20,000 per kg.
Three missions for the Falcon 9 SmallSat Rideshare program have so far been posted by SpaceX. Each of the missions will launch from the Space Launch Complex 4E at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the first of which is estimated to launch between November 2020 and March 2021. The launch periods for the next two SmallSat Rideshare missions have not been posted by the private space firm, though it has noted that the second mission will launch at Q1 2022 and the third will be at Q1 2023.
SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare program is the private space company’s lowest-cost program yet. This allows SpaceX to dip its toes into a market that has so far been addressed by companies such as Rocket Lab, whose expendable Electron rocket enables payloads of up to 150 kg to be sent to SSO for $5 million. With SpaceX’s prices for its recently-announced program, the cost per kg for a full Rocket Lab Electron would be twice as expensive.
Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket and is the first commercial orbital-class rocket with a reusable booster. The rocket’s current iteration, dubbed Block 5, is designed for significant reuse, and SpaceX has designed Block 5 boosters to fly up to ten times with only minor repairs and inspections between flights.
-
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk shed two new bits of detail on Starship following its 13th test launch, which was an overwhelming success.
SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time last Friday after two delays: one on Monday when several Raptor engines did not ignite, and another on Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions in Starbase, Texas.
The launch was overwhelmingly successful. SpaceX was able to complete a necessary test of the heat shield tiles by increasing the acceleration of Starship from launch throughout the flight; 20 Starlink v3 satellites were released with no issue; the Super Heavy Booster landed safely in the Gulf of America, Ship successfully reignited engines while in space; and it also splashed down without incident in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Nevertheless, more details are coming out about Starship, and Musk is doing the talking.
Starship Will Be Retrieved in the Ocean
Musk revealed on Tuesday night that Starship would be recovered by a ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX routinely tries to recover Starship after splashdown in an effort to find out more about the flight by examining the spacecraft afterward.
We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship https://t.co/fUqUZTITO9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2026
This helps engineers find out more about why things might have happened, allows them to examine any potential damage or anomalies that might have occurred, and increases the chances of an even more successful flight next time thanks to the additional information recovered.
Ship Could Have Been Caught by Tower Arms, Musk claims
Musk has already indicated that SpaceX will plan to attempt a catch of Starship with the 14th test flight. While this would be a major accomplishment, it would be an expected next step, considering the fact that the Super Heavy Booster has already been caught by the chopsticks on numerous occasions.
The ship landing was precise, meaning that it would have been caught by the tower arms https://t.co/6nbNrRfX9P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
A ship catch would be a great indication of where SpaceX stands in terms of reusability and launch cadence. A successful catch with relatively no incidents would be a good sign that SpaceX is nearing a more frequent launch of Starship, but also that the reusability of the massive rocket would be something many would expect in the near future.
It is a necessity to make life multiplanetary.
Elon Musk has updated his timeline for when humans will walk on Mars and for when ships will simply get there.
The objective of getting to Mars has been one of Musk’s biggest goals since becoming a serial entrepreneur and realizing that time on Earth is limited. Musk has said several times he hopes to die on Mars, and not by impact.
Musk now believes that people will be on Mars in “roughly 5 to 7 years.” He said that a Mars lander will get there “a few years sooner.”
People on Mars in roughly 5 to 7 years.
Mars lander a few years sooner.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
The response from Musk comes after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that SpaceX’s biggest priority is the Moon and not Mars. Because of this, Isaacman conceded that he believes nuclear power and propulsion investments will provide “potentially the pathway with the fewest miracles required to put four people on Mars in the next 10 to 15 years.”
Of course, this is what NASA can do through taxpayer funding and nuclear investments, he added.
Musk’s grand ambitions are much more optimistic than most, and it is certainly a double-edged sword. This is not the first time timelines for Mars have been somewhat lofty, especially to those normal thinkers like you and me, not super geniuses like Musk.
In fact, the SpaceX and Tesla frontman has said on at least a dozen occasions that we could be on Mars in the coming years. Musk said 2020 would be the big year as early as 2009. In 2020, he was “highly confident” of a landing in 2026, and had even said 2024 in a best-case scenario.
The point is, the range has varied, and it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get there. This latest adjustment to the timeline is typical of Musk, and while the Moon has seemingly taken priority over Mars, it is still worth mentioning that the ultimate goal is to make life multiplanetary, and it starts potentially with the Red Planet.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch
