Cape Canaveral, United States - April 21, 2025 SpaceX completed its third Falcon 9 launch in less than 48 hours with the Bandwagon-3 rideshare mission, marking the 300th orbital flight from Cape Canaveral’s pad 40. The Bandwagon-3 mission lifted off at 8:48 p.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It was the 245th orbital launch for SpaceX from SLC-40. This was the third mission in SpaceX’s rideshare program to mid-inclination orbits, following Bandwagon-1 and Bandwagon-2, and 13 Transporter missions to polar orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage booster used, tail number 1090, launched for the third time. It previously supported the O3b mPOWER-E mission and Crew-10. About eight minutes after liftoff, B1090 landed at Landing Zone 2. Among the payloads onboard was the fourth synthetic aperture radar satellite for the Korea 425 Project constellation for the South Korean military. The previous three satellites launched between December 2023 and December 2024. The Korea 425 Project is managed by Korea Aerospace Industries and involves Hanwha Systems Corporation and Thales Alenia Space. The project will conclude with one more satellite launch by 2025. Other payloads included Tomorrow.io’s Tomorrow-S7 satellite and Atmos Space Cargo’s Phoenix re-entry capsule. Tomorrow-S7 is a 6U CubeSat that will observe all-weather temperature and humidity profiles from a low Earth orbit at 515 km altitude. Atmos Space Cargo’s Phoenix 1 mission will test a re-entry capsule with an inflatable heat shield. The capsule carries payloads from Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Phoenix 1 is expected to conclude with a splashdown about 2,000 km off the coast of Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean after a re-entry trajectory starting over Los Angeles. Atmos plans to monitor the capsule during re-entry with a chartered aircraft to recover flight data for the development of Phoenix 2, expected to launch in 2026.