Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
This week has seen Space-X’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission successfully launch 119 satellites into orbit. While this is a myriad of new satellites in orbit, it is well below the single mission record of 143 by SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission on 24th January 2021. China also had a further launch of two Earth Observation satellites.
Transporter-16 Mission
This week began on the 30th March with a massive rideshare mission from SpaceX, where 119 payloads were launched into sun-synchronous orbits from a Falcon-9 rocket which took off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
As this mission launched so many small satellites, we’re, obviously, going to focus on the Earth Observation (EO) payloads, alongside a couple of others that caught out attention. The key EO payloads included:
- HotSat 1 – A pathfinder mission for the UK company, Satellite Vu, carrying a low-cost high resolution mid-wave infrared (MWIR) imager built by Surry Satellite Technology Limited, and offering a ground resolution of 3.5 m and a swath width of 4 km.
- Eight IRIDE-MS1-EAGLET2 satellites for Italy’s OHB Italia S.p.A., which offers high-resolution multi-spectral imaging. It is part of a programme led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with the involvement of the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The eight satellites launched here join a previous eight which were successfully launched on 21st November 2025, with a further eight to be launched later to complete the constellation. The data will be used to monitor land cover, vegetation health and crop types.
- Six X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites for the Finish company, ICEYE, some of which are dedicated satellites for specific clients.
- Two NuSat Mark-V satellites for Satellogic, which are high-resolution optical satellites offering a spatial resolution of 70cm with a swath of 6.5km.
- Garai B satellite for Spanish company SATLANTIS. The imagers offer 4 visible bands and 6 infrared bands, with resolutions down to 80 cm, and the data is used for applications such as methane emissions detection. This follows the launch of Garai A in January 2025.
- VIREON-1 and VIREON-2 satellites for AAC Clyde Space. These are the first two satellites in its proprietary EO constellation, offering high-resolution multi-spectral imagery at a 1.5m ground resolution. The aim is to deliver analysis-ready datasets for agriculture and forestry.
- Io-1: a CubeSat for Iota Technology to advance global magnetic field measurements, which was also built by AAC Clyde Space.
- Eight Lemur-2 satellites from Spire Global aimed at tracking maritime, aviation and weather activity from orbit.
- ERMIS-1, 2 & 3: The Greek Hellenic Space Agency launched three demonstration satellites which are expected to operate as a constellation and will test a hyperspectral imager, 5G communications for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and a satellite telecommunications system.
One of the other satellites that caught out attention, given recent blogs we have written about the potential for in-orbit data centres, was the Gravitas satellite for K2 Space. This satellite has a wingspan of 40 meters when its solar panels are unfurled and is designed to produce 20 kW of electricity to test technologies needed for in-orbit data centres.
China
China continued its recent resumption of launches by putting Siwei Gaojing-2 05 and Siwei Gaojing-2 06 into orbit on 26th March. These satellites, also known as SuperView, carry high-resolution optical imagers offering a spatial resolution of 0.5m in panchromatic mode, and 2m in multispectral mode.
Summary
The drive to have more satellites in orbit continues apace and launches such as the Transport-17 mission simply show how quickly large numbers of satellites can be put into the sky – if you add in the 25 Starlink satellites also launched by SpaceX last week, and the other launches that occurred, there are over 150 new objects in orbit in the last week alone.
