One of the two Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX would take off earlier this week in less than five hours will remain grounded until at least Sunday, preventing Cape Canaveral from hosting two launches on the same day for the first time in decades.
But the Eastern Range military administration was ready for the back-to-back missions, and probably won’t have to wait long for the next chance for a double header.
Col. Mark Shoemaker, commander of the 45th operational group at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, said Wednesday that the Eastern Range is ready for faster revolutions between the launch from the Space Coast in Florida.
The series approved a SpaceX request for two Falcon 9 launches Thursday less than five hours apart, each containing 60 Starlink Internet satellites for SpaceX’s ever-growing broadband network.
SpaceX successfully launched one of the Falcon 9 rockets on Thursday at 01:19 EST (0619 GMT) from Route 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Station, but the other mission – to send from Route 39A a few miles north at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center – was delayed from Thursday to Friday, and then again until no earlier than Sunday.
According to SpaceX, the delays will give extra time for ‘pre-launch checks’ before the Falcon 9 takes off from road 39A.
With a packed launch schedule in 2021, the Eastern Range will likely soon be asked to accommodate two missions on the same day.
“We’ve said a dozen times in the last eight to nine months that we can do two in less than 24 hours, and everyone … is excited,” Shoemaker said in an interview this week. ‘Then, if the weather or another factor says no, we are not going to do it this time, there is a bit of disappointment because everyone wants to see it happen.
“We want to see that happen, because honestly, how exciting it would be to see two rockets go off the Eastern Range in a short amount of time,” Shoemaker said.
In August 2019, a Falcon 9 and an Atlas 5 rocket from the United Launch Alliance took off in a period of less than 35 hours from neighboring cushions on Cape Canaveral. It was the shortest span between two orbits in Cape Canaveral since May 1981.
There were two launches separated by less than ten hours in 1967, and an Atlas Agena launch vehicle took off just an hour and 39 minutes from Cape Canaveral before the two-man Gemini 12 crew on a Titan rocket was launched in November 1966. The crew of the Gemini 12 arrived in orbit with the Agena top stage.
Launch blocks at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center supported 31 rocket flights last year, and more than 50 missions are planned for 2021, according to the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the unit led by Shoemaker and management of all Eastern Range launches on the Space Coast.
The faster launch rate in Cape Canaveral is powered by SpaceX, which flew 25 of the 31 rockets from the Space Coast last year.
“I saw evolution when SpaceX first came here, and when we did eight to ten launches a year, we had a great year,” Shoemaker said. “And now we’re looking at the bottom 50s on the calendar for the year.”
According to Shoemaker, track officials have approved over the past few months that two launches took place within a 24-hour period.
“Why it did not happen, whether it was a weather problem that caused the delay, or whether it was something on the part of the presenter of the launch that caused the delay, these are things that are beyond our control,” he said. “Probably a decade ago we would have said no way, but we really concentrated on the way we do business and focused on how we provide support to whoever is within the range.”
Military officials met with SpaceX and ULA, the two major launch contractors flying off the Space Coast, and newcomers like Blue Origin to learn what the commercial rocket companies from the series need.
“One of the things that has helped us get better is that the customer base comes in and says I need to do more, or that I need to do more, and I need to do it faster,” Shoemaker said.
“It’s not that we could not have done it a decade ago,” he said. “The question was not there. The coercive function was not there. ”
Military units at Eastern Range provide security and safety services, manage infrastructure, provide weather forecasting assistance and help clear the airspace and waters under the right environment prior to launch. The emphasis is on agility and responsiveness to user needs, Shoemaker said.
‘When they want to start, we want to plan the launch so they can do it. Whether they ask us six months ahead of time, or they ask us a week in advance, we want to get to yes. ”
Bad weather and technical factors continue to hamper rocket launches, and Shoemaker said the series approved nearly 200 launches last year, leading to the 31 successful flights by SpaceX and ULA.
“So we have come to yes 200 times, which is critical,” he said. ‘I would say almost every time someone asked us to start, we said yes, you can do it. Then a dozen times, we said, yes, you can do it, and the other customer can do it, and we can do it in 24 hours or less. ‘
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets fly with autonomous self-destruct mechanisms, reducing the workforce needed to support a launch. ULA’s Atlas and Delta rockets still use man-in-the-loop flight termination systems, which require a runway security officer to locate the launcher’s runway and send a manual destruction order as a major problem during the flight occurs.
According to Shoemaker, the autonomous destruction systems allow us “much more flexibility to move schedules around and to support activities much more closely on each other.”
“The long-term vision is to automate things,” Shoemaker said.
The Space Force wants all spacecraft flying from military ranges by 2025 to have autonomous self-destruction capability.
The advent of autonomous flight termination systems allows the range of radar trackers. And the two-way communication links for the manual destruction signal are not necessary for rockets flying with automatic safety mechanisms, like the Falcon launch family of SpaceX.
“If you do not need to call up so much equipment, you need to spend less time setting up the equipment to make sure it is ready between missions, so it offers only a significant amount of flexibility. , “said Shoemaker. “It was vital that we were able to say yes to all the times we’ve done over the past year.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, officials of the series said they typically needed about 48 hours to reconfigure infrastructure and equipment from one launch to the next.
Gen. Doug Schiess, the former commander of the 45th Space Wing, said last year that the Eastern Range needed about 300 people to support a ULA launch with a manual flight termination system. For a SpaceX mission, with an automated safety system, the number is reduced to about 200,.
Shoemaker said the 45th Space Wing performed exercises from the series team to practice how they could support two SpaceX missions within hours, or ULA and SpaceX launches on the same day. He declined to say how close to the Eastern Range in time could support two launches.
“I do not want to pin it down and say that we can do within an hour (two launches), or that we can do three within 24 hours,” Shoemaker said.
“The conditions must be right,” he said. ‘We could end up in a different scenario where they ask us two months from now to do two (launches) in less than five hours, but an external factor that we do not necessarily control can lead us to not only to be able to say. yes. ”
National security missions and some NASA launches with limited interplanetary launch windows are preferred on the Eastern Range.
The military exercises conducted by the 45th Space Wing helped identify areas where the range of procedures could change and processes updated.
‘The exercise is to run similarly to the countdown of two different launch vehicles with two crew members and understand what we need to improve in terms of training and the way we perform our parts of the mission, and in the meantime to do disruption. , ”Shoemaker said.
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