SpaceX Ties a Starlink Launch to a Rideshare Twist
SpaceX's ninth Starlink batch shared its Falcon 9 ride with Planet's Earth-imaging satellites, spotlighting a growing rideshare side business.
SpaceX got another batch of Starlink satellites off the ground today, and on paper it looks like business as usual: roughly 60 flat-packed broadband satellites stacked on a Falcon 9, the ninth such Starlink launch so far. But this one had a wrinkle worth paying attention to. Riding alongside the Starlink stack were commercial Earth-imaging satellites from Planet, the San Francisco company known for its constellation of small “Dove” satellites that photograph the entire planet’s landmass on a near-daily basis.
That’s the interesting part. This wasn’t a dedicated Starlink mission with a bit of spare room filled by a favor to a partner — it’s a real rideshare arrangement, where an outside customer bought space on a rocket that SpaceX was already flying for its own purposes. And it’s a pretty clean signal of where SpaceX wants to take its launch business over the next few years.
Two businesses on one rocket
Think about what’s actually happening here. SpaceX needs to launch an enormous number of Starlink satellites — thousands of them, eventually — to build out its broadband constellation. Each of those launches burns a Falcon 9, and each Falcon 9 has finite payload volume and mass margin. Historically, that margin either goes unused or gets soaked up by extra Starlink units. Instead, SpaceX is starting to sell that leftover capacity to other satellite operators who need to get to orbit and don’t want to wait for a dedicated launch slot.
For Planet, this is a fairly straightforward transaction: get satellites into a useful orbit without footing the bill for an entire rocket. For SpaceX, it’s closer to a strategic bet. Every Starlink launch that also carries paying rideshare payloads effectively lowers the marginal cost of the broadband buildout while opening up a new, recurring revenue stream that doesn’t depend on Starlink actually working out as a business. If small-satellite operators, university cubesat teams, and other companies with modest payloads start treating “hop on a Starlink launch” as a normal way to get to space, that’s a meaningful shift in how crowded and how cheap orbital access becomes.
It’s also a neat validation of the reusability story SpaceX has been telling for years. A rideshare program only makes sense economically if launches are frequent and inexpensive enough that adding a secondary payload is worth the paperwork and integration work for everyone involved. Frequent, cheap launches are exactly what a reusable Falcon 9 fleet is supposed to deliver, and Starlink’s own launch cadence — this is already the ninth batch — is providing plenty of opportunities to test that model in practice.
I’d keep an eye on how formalized this arrangement becomes. If SpaceX starts publishing a regular schedule of rideshare slots on upcoming Starlink flights, with set pricing and mass allocations, it starts to look a lot less like an opportunistic pairing and a lot more like a genuine second product line sitting on top of the satellite internet effort. Given how much SpaceX likes to advertise pricing and specs up front for its other services, that wouldn’t be surprising at all.