SpaceX had a very busy Thursday, pulling off something it had done only once before: three launches in less than 13 hours.
The third and final mission, NROL-97, lifted off aboard a Falcon Heavy from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center just before midnight Thursday.
A secret mission
Here’s what makes it interesting: we don’t know what was on board.
The Falcon Heavy carried a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. intelligence agency that operates the country’s spy satellites. It was Falcon Heavy’s first mission for the NRO.
The NRO isn’t saying what it sent into orbit or exactly where it was headed. But Space.com notes the choice of Falcon Heavy instead of the smaller Falcon 9 suggests the payload was particularly heavy, headed to a more distant destination — or both.
Three launches in one day
Earlier Thursday, SpaceX sent Crew-13 to the International Space Station. The four-person crew arrived about eight hours later to begin a six-month mission in orbit.
A few hours later came Transporter-18, a “smallsat rideshare” mission that carried 130 payloads into orbit — including an AI-in-space prototype from Google.
The mission also carried a methane-tracking satellite and experiments involving pharmaceutical manufacturing in space.
All told, SpaceX has now launched more than 100 missions this year.
And if all this has you thinking about sending something of your own into orbit, SpaceX sells space on its rideshare missions. The starting price: about $350,000.
Round out your reading
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