SpaceX has wrapped up its three hundredth profitable Falcon mission, following Sunday night’s launch of the veteran B1073 from storied Area Launch Advanced (SLC)-40 at Cape Canaveral Area Drive Station, Fla. Liftoff of the 12-times-used booster occurred at 8:52 p.m. EST and delivered 23 Starlink low-orbiting web communications satellites uphill within the fifth Falcon 9 flight inside January’s opening half.
Final night time’s launch continues a formidable 2024 cadence for the Hawthorne, Calif.-headquartered group, following on the heels of three prior Starlink flights—two from Vandenberg Area Drive Base, Calif., and one from the Area Coast, together with the primary six “Direct-to-Cell” satellites—in addition to a industrial mission on behalf of Sweden to deploy the Ovzon-3 broadband communications satellite tv for pc on the preliminary leg of its trek to Geostationary Switch Orbit (GTO). Aboard B1073, the 23-strong Starlink stack tipped the scales at simply over 40,600 kilos (18,400 kilograms) and introduced the overall variety of these flat-packed satellites launched since Might 2019 to effectively north of 5,700.
B1073 was initially scheduled to fly on Saturday night, however was referred to as off and reset as a substitute for Sunday and an expansive “window” with a set of T-0 factors extending from 7:27 p.m. EST by 11:25 p.m. EST. In readiness for launch, the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASDS), “A Shortfall of Gravitas”, departed Port Canaveral on 11 January, having earlier returned with the B1067 booster after her 7 January mission.
Climate circumstances for a launch on Sunday, and a backup try on Monday night, couldn’t have been extra reverse: with an 85-percent probability of acceptable circumstances for the primary alternative, earlier than deteriorating markedly to solely 20-percent-favorable for the second. “Late Sunday, a heat entrance to our south begins to meander north, bringing with it a thick layer of low clouds with embedded showers,” famous the forty fifth Climate Squadron at Patrick Area Drive Base in its L-1 briefing.
“For the first launch window, climate appears to be like principally favorable, with the first concern being the Thick Cloud Layers Rule,” it added. “Chance of violation stays low as a result of low-altitude tops of the thick cloud layer and anticipated positioning simply to the south of the Spaceport.”
However with quite a few showers and some robust storms anticipated from Monday afternoon into Tuesday, a starker climate image was on the playing cards, inflicting what the forty fifth described as “concern for a number of launch climate constraint violations”. This consists of potential violation of the Thick Cloud Layers Rule, the Floor Electrical Discipline Mill Rule and the Disturbed Climate Rule.
Heading into Sunday’s opening try, fueling of the Falcon 9 with liquid oxygen and a extremely refined type of rocket-grad kerosene (referred to as “RP-1”) received underway shortly after 8 p.m. EST, as SpaceX aimed for a T-0 round 90 minutes into final night time’s window. With out additional ado, B1073 sprang into the darkness at 8:52 p.m. EST, the sensible exhaust of her 9 Merlin 1D+ engines pushing the automobile uphill below a mixed thrust of 1.5 million kilos (680,000 kilograms).
It was the twelfth outing of this explicit Falcon 9 core, which entered service again in Might 2022 and has now emplaced 297 Starlinks into orbit on eight discrete missions. The veteran booster additionally lifted the SES-22 and Amazonas Nexus geostationary communications satellites to GTO in June 2022 and February of final 12 months, respectively, and launched a lunar-bound mission in December 2022 with Japan’s Hakuto-R Moon lander, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Rashid rover and NASA’s water-ice-seeking Lunar Flashlight.
And simply final March, on her seventh mission, she turned essentially the most flight-seasoned Falcon 9 ever to elevate a payload—whether or not human or cargo—to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) with the CRS-27 Cargo Dragon. With final night time’s flight, she turns into the tenth booster since March 2022 to achieve a twelfth launch.
B1073 separated from the stack at 2.5 minutes into ascent and accomplished a picture-perfect return homeward, guided by Entry and Touchdown “burns” and her suite of hypersonic grid-fins to alight easily on ASOG’s deck about eight minutes after liftoff. The only Merlin 1D+ Vacuum engine of the Falcon 9’s second stage then ignited for a customary six-minute firing to ship the 23 Starlinks safely into orbit.
Deployment occurred a little bit shy of 65 minutes into the mission, bringing to 89 the overall variety of these small satellites emplaced into area up to now in 2024. As a community, Starlink permits high-speed and low-latency web provision to 70 sovereign nations and worldwide markets in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Landlocked Eswatini—previously Swaziland—in southern Africa, along with Honduras and Paraguay joined Starlink final month.
The downsized Starlink “V2 Mini” satellites, first flown final February, boast three to 4 instances better “usable” bandwidth than earlier Starlink iterations. “V2 Minis embody key applied sciences—resembling extra highly effective phased-array antennas and using E-Band for backhaul—which can permit Starlink to offer 4x extra capability per satellite tv for pc than earlier iterations,” SpaceX defined. “Amongst different enhancements, V2 Minis are geared up with new argon Corridor thrusters for on-orbit maneuvering.”
Florida-based intercity operator Brightline adopted Starlink on its trains earlier in 2023, the primary passenger rail service on the planet to take action. Moreover, El Salvador’s Ministry of Schooling has begun integrating Starlink functionality into its faculties to assist shut the digital divide between city and distant rural communities and 50 Rwandan faculties at the moment are related through Starlink’s high-speed web service.
Earlier this month, SpaceX additionally launched the primary six of its “Direct-to-Cell” Starlinks, which allow cell community suppliers to supply “seamless international entry to texting, calling and searching” whether or not “on land, lakes or coastal waters”, with out altering {hardware} or firmware. Final week, the group confirmed its staff had despatched and obtained their first textual content messages through Direct-to-Cell solely six days after launch.
Final night time’s launch additionally marked the three hundredth profitable flight of a Falcon-class booster, counting a pair of Falcon 1 missions in September 2008 and July 2009, along with 289 Falcon 9 missions since June 2010—not counting the in-flight lack of the CRS-7 Cargo Dragon in June 2015—and 9 missions by the triple-barreled Falcon Heavy between February 2018 and final month. These 300 launches have resulted within the profitable touchdown of a minimum of 264 boosters (each single-stick Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavy middle cores or side-boosters) both on strong floor or atop oceangoing drone ships.
Wanting forward, Dragon Freedom is ready to rise atop the B1080 booster from historic Pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Area Heart (KSC) at 5:11 p.m. EST Wednesday, carrying a crew of 4 on AxiomSpace, Inc.’s all-private Ax-3 mission to the ISS. On Friday, SpaceX famous that the Ax-3 crew’s Dragon Freedom spacecraft had arrived on the 39A hangar forward of integration atop the booster.
Led by former ISS commander, America’s most skilled spacewalker and AxiomSpace Chief Astronaut Mike Lopez-Alegria, the Ax-3 crew consists of flyers from Italy (Pilot Walter Villadei), Sweden (Mission Specialist Marcus Wandt) and the primary nationwide area traveler of Türkiye (Alper Gezeravcı). They’re focusing on docking on the ISS at 5:15 p.m. EST Friday and can spend about two weeks performing a variety of scientific analysis, know-how demonstrations and academic outreach alongside the station’s incumbent Expedition 70 crew.
They may fly Dragon Freedom, which is embarking on her third journey to area, having beforehand supported the six-month keep of Crew-4 Commander Kjell Lindgren, Bob “Farmer” Hines and Mission Specialists Jessica Watkins and Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti between April and October of 2022 and extra lately AxiomSpace’s Ax-2 industrial mission final Might, crewed by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, airshow pilot John Shoffner and Ali Al-Qarni and Rayyanah Barnawi of Saudi Arabia, the latter of whom turned the primary Arab girl to voyage into area.
Of be aware, Lopez-Alegria turns into solely the tenth human (and the eighth American) to achieve a sixth private spaceflight. Chosen into NASA’s Astronaut Corps in March 1992, he flew three Area Shuttle missions between October 1995 and December 2002, earlier than commanding Expedition 14 from September 2006 by April 2007, the longest ISS increment—greater than seven months—at the moment.
As AxiomSpace’s Chief Astronaut, Lopez-Alegria went on to command the historic Ax-1 mission in April 2022 and backed up Whitson on final 12 months’s Ax-2. Presently, solely two different people—retired shuttle astronauts Jerry Ross and Franklin Chang-Diaz—have logged greater than six spaceflights, each having flown a seventh time in April and June 2002.
