SpaceX has regained its stride after a failure earlier this month.
The corporate launched two missions on Sunday morning (July 28), lofting batches of its Starlink web satellites from each coasts atop Falcon 9 rockets lower than 5 hours aside.
The 2 liftoffs took place 24 hours after a Saturday morning (July 27) Falcon 9 launch, which was the car’s return-to-flight mission after a July 11 failure.
Sunday’s first launch occurred at 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509), when a Falcon 9 topped with 23 Starlink satellites lifted off from Cape Canaveral House Pressure Station in Florida. It was the 14th mission for this Falcon 9 first stage and the three hundredth reflight of a SpaceX booster total, the corporate wrote in an X post on Sunday morning.
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Then, at 5:22 a.m. EDT (0922 GMT; 1:22 a.m. native California time), the corporate despatched a Falcon 9 up from California’s Vandenberg House Pressure Base. This rocket carried 21 Starlink satellites, 13 of which may beam service on to cell telephones.
Each missions had been absolutely profitable, according to SpaceX. The rockets’ first phases aced their landings on ships at sea, and their higher phases deployed the Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit as deliberate.
The July 11 mishap — the primary in-flight failure for a Falcon 9 since June 2015 — occurred when the higher stage sprang a leak of liquid oxygen, which prevented it from performing a deliberate orbit-raising burn. The rocket’s payload, 20 Starlink satellites, had been deployed too low in consequence.
SpaceX traced the reason for the leak to a crack in a line for a stress sensor within the liquid-oxygen system. And the corporate has taken measures to forestall the issue from taking place once more.
“For near-term Falcon launches, the failed sense line and sensor on the second-stage engine will probably be eliminated,” SpaceX wrote in an anomaly update on Thursday afternoon (July 25). “The sensor will not be utilized by the flight security system and will be coated by alternate sensors already current on the engine.”
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