Overview
- Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg’s SLC-4E at 8:44 a.m. Eastern, marking SpaceX’s inaugural Twilight rideshare flight.
- Payload deployments started 61 minutes after liftoff and concluded more than 90 minutes later during a staged upper‑stage sequence.
- NASA’s trio included Pandora to probe exoplanet atmospheres under the Astrophysics Pioneers program, the SPARCS UV CubeSat to monitor flares on K and M dwarfs, and the BlackCAT X‑ray mission to catch high‑energy transients.
- Commercial satellites featured 10 Kepler Aether optical data‑relay nodes and nine Spire Lemur spacecraft, with additional payloads from Plan‑S, HawkEye 360, Capella Space, Iceye and Umbra.
- The mission placed spacecraft into dusk–dawn sun‑synchronous orbits around 500–600 km in altitude, with Exolaunch handling a large share of customer deployments.