Falcon 9 Rideshare: CAS500-2 + 44 Co-Passengers (45 Satellites Total) — B1071 (33rd Flight) Lands at LZ-4; SpaceX's 55th Orbital Mission of 2026

SpaceX launched 45 satellites on a Falcon 9 rideshare from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 12:00 a.m. PDT (07:00 UTC) on May 3, 2026. The primary payload was CAS500-2 — South Korea's Compact Advanced Satellite 500-2, a 500 kg-class precision Earth observation spacecraft built by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). CAS500-2 was originally manifested on a Russian Soyuz launch vehicle but was rebooked after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine severed Western commercial launch access. The 44 secondary payloads included: 2 Lynk Tower direct-to-device satellites (Tower 7 & 8, Lynk Global), 3 Pelican Earth observation satellites (Planet Labs), True Anomaly's Jackal autonomous inspector/rendezvous spacecraft, 7 HEO MicroSats (Argotec, for Italy's IRIDE constellation), 6 Loft-EarthDaily analytics satellites, GalaxEye Mission Drishti (India's largest privately built Earth observation satellite), Eycore-1 (Poland's first synthetic aperture radar satellite), and multiple cubesats deployed via Exolaunch. Booster B1071 flew its record 33rd mission, landing at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) at Vandenberg approximately 7.5 minutes post-liftoff — the 34th landing at LZ-4 and SpaceX's 608th cumulative booster recovery in history. All 45 payloads were confirmed successfully deployed. This was SpaceX's 55th orbital mission of 2026.