The Spaceflight team came together Thursday night in Seattle for a Viewing Party of PSLV’s Return to Flight.  With 19 of our own customers’ satellites on this mission, we excitedly watched the pre-launch preparations and then the final countdown.  As the rocket launched from SHAR’s FLP (First Launch Pad), we held our breathe, rethinking all of the arrangements that we had done to get this far.  Launch is both a time of excitement and a time of nervousness for many people in the space business.  A phrase that comes up frequently during our busy months is “Space is Hard” and we can certainly never underestimate that fact.

Luckily, the fruits of everyone’s labor paid off.  At approximately 15 minutes after liftoff, we started to hear the audio confirmations that spacecraft were separating. ICEYE’s POC-1 was one of the first satellites to leave the MSA (Multi Satellite Adapter).

From there, a few minutes later, our many dispensers started to receive commands to open their doors and individual satellites started to exit into space, beginning the next phase of their lives.  Soon we received the telemetry data to pass on to customers so that they could start communicating with their satellites.

Less than 24 hours since launch, many of our customers have already started 2-way comm with their satellites.  It is definitely an exciting time to see how each of these customers will use their satellites and expand from this experience.  I’m sure their next launches will bring even more new technologies to the forefront and we can’t wait to be a part of it!

You can watch a great video from the view of the onboard camera here and feel free to download it as well.

Til next launch,

Annie