EDITOR’S NOTE: The launch of SpaceX’s next mission is scheduled for Sunday 6:01 AM EDT (1001 GMT). Summer time begins Sunday at 2 a.m. local time in the United States.
For the third time in ten days, SpaceX is preparing a Falcon 9 rocket to launch Sunday from Florida’s Space Coast with another 60 Starlink Internet satellites. This time, SpaceX aims to extend the record for the reuse of a Falcon 9 booster to nine flights.
The launch of SpaceX’s next 60 Starlink satellites is scheduled for an immediate event at 06:01 EDT (1001 GMT) Sunday from Route 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The mission is SpaceX’s eighth Falcon 9 launch of the year, and the third in ten days from two Florida launch pads a few miles apart. The two previous Falcon 9 flights on March 4 and March 11 each carried 60 Starlink satellites in orbit.
SpaceX transmitted the Falcon 9 rocket for Sunday’s launch early on Saturday 39A and the 70-meter rocket rolled a quarter mile from an integration hangar on the southern perimeter of the historic launch complex, which was used earlier as a departure. point for Apollo lunar missions and numerous spacecraft flights.
Ground crews are expected to lift the rocket vertically later Saturday to prepare for the countdown Sunday, when SpaceX crews will oversee the loading of the two-stage launcher with petroleum and liquid oxygen propellants.
There is a 90% chance of favorable weather for the lifting of Sunday morning, according to the 45th Weather Squadron of the US Space Force.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched Sunday will fly with a first stage booster recovered from eight previous missions. The booster – named B1051 – will be the first in SpaceX’s stock to launch for the ninth time. Two different first phases in SpaceX’s fleet, including B1051, are currently on par with eight missions.
The rocket’s boot, or nose cone, was also upgraded from a previous mission. The cloak was launched on a Falcon 9 mission in January, and SpaceX repair ships retrieved the caps from the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX officials said the latest version of the Falcon 9 booster could make ten flights with only inspections and minor overhauls between missions. With the overhaul, the Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters can fly 100 missions, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
Hans Koenigsmann, a senior adviser and former vice-president at SpaceX, said last month that he believed the limit for ten flights was not a “magic number”.
“We have learned a lot about refurbishment,” he said during a panel discussion on Feb. 23 during the 47th Space Summit. “We’re learning … what we need to pay attention to, and maybe some of this is obvious. We want to take care of the heat shield. There are some engine components that regularly require some inspection to make sure the seals are working, and so on. So we learned with each landing. ”
The Starlink network drives SpaceX’s high-pace launch cadences. Koenigsmann said SpaceX will soon reach the 10-fly point with one of its Falcon 9 boosters.
“I’m pretty sure we’ll get to 10 flights soon, and then we’ll continue to look at the booster and make an assessment (or) we can go ahead with it,” he said. “My personal opinion is that we will probably continue until we see more damage to the booster.”
Koenigsmann said SpaceX would look at data rather than specifying a certain number of flights for each booster.
“We will inspect them regularly, at regular intervals,” he said. ‘And the next time you see if the engine is holding out and see if there is any damage. To me, this is an engineering problem. I do not think the number 10 is a magic number.
“For example, at some point we may start phasing in new components and extending the life of the booster,” Koenigsmann said.
To date, SpaceX has launched 1,265 Starlink Internet satellites. Some of these satellites were prototypes and re-entered the atmosphere and burned up. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a respected tracker of aerospace activity, says SpaceX currently has about 1,200 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Launching Sunday will be SpaceX’s 22nd dedicated Falcon 9 mission with Starlink satellites.
The Starlink network could eventually number more than 10,000 satellites, but the first set of Starlinks would have 1,584 satellites orbiting 550 kilometers above the earth on paths tilted 53 degrees to the equator. SpaceX has been approved by the Federal Communications Commission for approximately 12,000 Starlink satellites at a variety of altitudes and slopes, all within a few hundred kilometers of the planet. The low altitude enables the satellites to deliver high-speed connections with low latency to customers, and helps to ensure that the spacecraft naturally re-enters the atmosphere faster than when they would fly farther from Earth.
Starlink already provides interim beta services in high-latitude areas, such as the northern United States, Canada, and England. More Starlink launches this year will allow for an expanded coverage area.
SpaceX announced earlier this week that the Starlink beta service will soon reach customers in Germany, New Zealand and other regions of the UK, including Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northern England. These areas could receive beta service in the coming weeks, SpaceX said.
SpaceX accepts pre-orders from prospective Starlink consumers, who can pay $ 99 to book their place in the queue to get Starlink service when available in their area. For people in the southern United States and other regions with lower latitude, it should arrive by late 2021, SpaceX says.
Once confirmed, customers will pay $ 499 for a Starlink antenna and modem, plus $ 50 for shipping and handling, SpaceX said. A subscription costs $ 99 per month.
The Starlink satellites are being built by SpaceX in Redmond, Washington, and each spacecraft weighs about a quarter of a ton when lifted. They are equipped with power-powered solar wings, propulsion krypton ion propellers and sights to dim their brightness for humans on the ground, a mitigation added to Starlink satellites last year after astronomers worried the spacecraft would make some telescopic observations. devastate.
Like previous Starlink launches, the satellites will separate from their Falcon 9 launcher on Sunday in a lower transmission orbit and then use their ion propellers to move higher in the Starlink fleet at 341 miles high.
The first phase of the Falcon 9 aims to land in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral about eight-and-a-half minutes after takeoff on SpaceX’s drone ship “Of course I still love you”. The drone will return the veteran rocket to Florida in preparation for a potential tenth launch.
The upper stage of the rocket will meanwhile guide the 60 Starlink satellites into an orbit with an average altitude of about 278 kilometers using two engine burns. The launch of the 60 flat-packed satellites is scheduled for 07:05 EST (1105 GMT), about 64 minutes after the Kennedy Space Center launched.
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