![]() Payloads for our upcoming fourth dedicated smallsat rideshare mission – Transporter-4 – were encapsulated into Falcon 9’s fairing late last week. EnMAP (950 kg or 2100 lb) is slightly heavier than the maximum weight SpaceX’s one-size-fits-all pricing allows for, but a customer with a similar 830 kilogram (1830 lb) spacecraft could launch it for as little as $4.6 million on a Transporter mission. SpaceX could have positioned it as a heavily discounted dedicated launch that just so happens to carry some secondary payloads – perhaps charging ‘just’ $15-30 million. In other words, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that SpaceX was able to charge DLR quite a bit more than Transporter-4’s other rideshare customers. ![]() Italy, for example, began work on an almost identically capable spacecraft – PRISMA – in 2008 and launched it in 2019 for ~$140 million.Īccording to one estimate, EnMAP’s cost has likely ballooned from ~$100 million to more than $330 million. Painfully, those delays mean that EnMAP – a spacecraft largely designed before 2010 – is merely the latest in a long line of similarly capable satellites. EnMAP itself is quite a bizarre case: the wildly overambitious smallsat was initially scheduled to launch as early as 2012 but has suffered a full decade of delays as endless issues arose. That customer is Germany’s national space agency (DLR), which has manifested EnMAP – a hyperspectral Earth observation satellite – on Transporter-4. ![]() It’s unclear why so few satellites will be aboard, but one customer in particular likely explains why the company can launch such a small payload. Transporter-4’s payload of 40 satellites is the smallest number SpaceX has ever manifested on one of its dedicated rideshare missions. ![]()
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