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Rideshare

A launch where dozens of satellites from unrelated customers share the same rocket, each paying a fraction of the cost instead of booking the whole vehicle.

Why it matters

Rideshare is the reason a university lab or an eight-person startup can put hardware in orbit at all: it moved the entry price from tens of millions of dollars to a few hundred thousand. The trade-off is control. A rideshare customer accepts the orbit, the date and the launch window chosen by whoever anchors the mission, and a delay to the primary payload drags every co-passenger with it. That is why a rideshare manifest is a poor fit for a satellite that must reach a specific orbit on a specific day, and an excellent one for a technology demonstrator that mainly needs to get up there.

In our data

Of the 350 missions in our Launch Tracker, only a handful are dedicated rideshares - but they carry a disproportionate share of the small satellites that fly each year. SpaceX runs two distinct lines: Transporter, which goes to sun-synchronous orbit, and Bandwagon, which serves mid-inclination orbits for customers who do not need a polar pass. Rocket Lab flies rideshares too, at a smaller scale and with more control over the target orbit.

Missions we track

2026-03-30 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 16 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare) Launch Successful
2026-07-07 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 17 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare) Launch Successful
2026-10-31 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 18 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare) To Be Determined
2026-10-31 Falcon 9 Block 5 | Bandwagon 5 (Dedicated Mid-Inclination Rideshare) To Be Determined
2026-04-23 Electron | Kakushin Rising (JAXA Rideshare) Launch Successful

Where we use it

Not to be confused with

A dedicated launch, where a single customer pays for the entire rocket and therefore picks the orbit, the date and the window. Also distinct from a hosted payload, where an instrument flies attached to somebody else's satellite rather than as a free-flying spacecraft of its own.