SpaceX launching 45 satellites to orbit early May 3: Watch it live
SpaceX will launch 45 satellites to orbit from California early Sunday morning (May 3), and you may watch the motion live.
TO Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to elevate off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sunday throughout a 37-minute window that opens at 2:59 am EDT (0659 GMT; 11:59 pm PDT on May 2 California time).
SpaceX calls the mission CAS500-2, after the first payload going up — the CAS500-2 Earth-observation satellite tv for pc, which was developed by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute.
South Korea’s CAS500 (“Compact Advanced Satellite 500”) program goals to function a complete of 5 satellites in low earth orbit. These spacecraft will collect knowledge for a variety of purposesfrom catastrophe monitoring to crop remark.
Two of the satellites have reached orbit to date. CAS500-1 lifted off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2021, and a South Korean Nuri automobile lofted CAS500-3 in November 2025.
As its identify suggests, CAS500-2 was supposed to be the second off the pad. It was booked to fly on a Soyuz in 2022, however Russia’s invasion of Ukraine In February of that yr he sunk the worldwide partnership that led to the deal, placing the satellite tv for pc in mothballs for a spell.
Previous Booster 1071 missions
Forty-four different satellites are flying together with CAS500-2. They’re a various bunch with many various operators — Argotec Srl, Exolaunch, Impulso.Space, Loft-EarthDay by day, Lynk Global, True Anomaly and Planet Labs, in accordance to SpaceX’s mission description.
If all goes to plan on Sunday morning, the Falcon 9’s first stage will land again at Vandenberg about 7.5 minutes after liftoff. It would be the thirty third launch and landing for this specific booster, which is designated B1071. That’s only one off the corporate reuse report, which a Falcon 9 set in late March throughout a starlink broadband-satellite launch.
CAS500-2 would be the first satellite tv for pc to deploy from the Falcon 9’s higher stage, at about 60 minutes after liftoff. The different payloads will comply with swimsuit over the following hour and a half.
Sunday morning’s launch would be the 54th of the yr thus far for SpaceX. All however one in all its 2026 missions to date have been Falcon 9 flights; the opposite one was carried out by the corporate’s highly effective Falcon Heavy.
