Final preparations are underway at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in India for the launch of a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) carrying nine cubesats courtesy of Spaceflight Industries.  This mission features two of our customers; Spire Global with eight LEMUR spacecraft, and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) with the BGUSat cubesat for Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel.

This is Spaceflight’s second PSLV mission on behalf of Spire, a U.S. company that provides Automatic Identification System (AIS) for maritime domain awareness, and GPS Radio Occultation for weather forecasting.  These eight LEMUR spacecraft will join the existing Spire constellation and provide expanded services and reliability for their customers.

Spaceflight would like to welcome IAI as a new launch customer with BGUSat, a University science experiment designed to perform cloud imaging from space and to measure atmospheric background radiation.  The college students at Ben Gurion University are excited to have their own spacecraft on orbit in a few days!

This PSLV mission will carry a total of 104 satellites into a sun synchronous orbit- a world record of satellites on one launch!  It will also mark an important Spaceflight event: we’ve hit (and passed) the 100 satellite milestone. With this launch, we’ve sent 103 satellites to space since our first one in 2013.  The team at Spaceflight is proud of this achievement, and to be part of enabling the growth of commercial enterprises and new science missions in space. We are looking forward to launching spacecraft for new and repeat customers on seven more missions scheduled for this year, and many more in 2018 and beyond.

Want to watch launch live? Launch telecast begins February 14, 7:30pm PST. Click here for the streaming link.