SpaceX launched an epic rideshare mission to space today (Aug. 16).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 116 different satellites launched on the company’s Transporter 11 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:56 p.m. EDT (1856 GMT; 11:56 a.m. local time.)
The first stage of Falcon 9 landed nearby the launch site roughly eight minutes after liftoff, as seen in the broadcast on X, formerly Twitter. It was the 12th successful flight for the veteran booster. SpaceX is expected to confirm the payload deployments later today.
Transporter 11 includes a range of payloads from different companies. One of the payloads, for example, is an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX chip. The chip is a noted artificial intelligence and edge computing graphics processing unit (GPU).
The Transporter 11 launch is SpaceX’s 80th of 2024, with more than 70% of the satellites devoted for Starlink.
