Not, like, the bird of prey. Like the big SpaceX rocket that, similar to its avian namesake, swoops back down to Earth once it's done its job. Buying the full capacity of such a big launcher is like booking out the town's largest, schmanciest bar: You really hope people will come to your party, and also that they'll pay their own tabs.

It was a little naive, Blake admits. But Spaceflight had a job to do, and a Falcon 9 seemed the way to do it. Spaceflight is a launch broker that, not unlike a travel agency, takes care of gritty takeoff details for satellite makers. The company wanted—needed—to launch a lot of small satellites. At the time, around 2015, there weren't many other options. Russia had invaded Crimea, making missions from there more difficult. India, which now holds the record for most satellites launched in one go, hadn't yet launched "secondary payloads," or a big ol' rocket rideshare, en masse. And smaller rockets, like Rocket Lab's Electron, were just glimmers in their parents' eyes.

Even before signing the contract with SpaceX, Spaceflight had lined up a bunch of customers, the final list of which included universities, artists, commercial Earth observers, and the military. Soon enough, SpaceX agreed to let the company stuff one of its rockets full of smallsats. Normally, a Falcon might tuck a few smallsats in as secondary payloads alongside a more impressive passenger, but they were never themselves the stars of the show. On the SmallSat Express, though, they were.