Watch SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch 81 satellites early on July 7

SpaceX will launch a passel of satellites to orbit early Tuesday morning (July 7), and you can watch the action live.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 81 payloads is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday, during a 95-minute window that opens at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0410 GMT; 12:10 a.m. local California time).

You can watch the mission, which is called Transporter-17, live via SpaceX. Coverage will begin about 15 minutes before launch.

As its name suggests, Transporter-17 will be the 17th mission of SpaceX‘s Transporter rideshare program. The company operates another rideshare series as well, called Bandwagon, which has launched four missions to date.

The 20 Transporter and Bandwagon missions that have flown to date sent more than 1,800 payloads to Earth orbit. Transporter-1 lofted 143 of those back in January 2021, which remains the global single-launch record.

The 81 payloads going up on Transporter-17 include “cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads and orbital transfer vehicles carrying eight of those payloads to be deployed at a later time,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description.

Perhaps the biggest satellite riding the Falcon 9 on Tuesday is CAS500-4, a South Korean Earth-observation craft that tips the scales at about 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms).

The satellite, whose name is short for “Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4,” will be the fourth member of a planned five-satellite CAS500 fleet in low Earth orbit (LEO). CAS500-4 will help the South Korean government monitor crops and forests, among other tasks.

If all goes according to plan on Tuesday morning, the Falcon 9’s first stage will land about 8.5 minutes after launch on the SpaceX droneship “Of Course I Still Love You,” which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean. It will be the 11th flight for this particular booster, according to the company’s Transporter-17 mission description.

The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, will haul the 81 payloads to LEO, where they’ll be deployed starting about 50.5 minutes after launch. CAS500-4 won’t be released until nearly 2.5 hours after liftoff.

Transporter-17 will be the 79th Falcon 9 launch of 2026. Nearly 80% of this year’s missions have been devoted to building out Starlink, SpaceX’s giant broadband constellation in LEO.

Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.