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Military officials in charge of the Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral are planning more than 50 launches from the Florida space coast this year, with SpaceX responsible for most of the launch activity, the 45th Space Wing vice commander said this week.
The Florida Spaceport hosted 31 launches in 2020, including 30 space missions and a high-altitude atmospheric test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Abandonment System.
“We closed the year with the highest number of launches in the past 10 years, and we are looking to break that record again in 2021,” said Col. Brande Walton, vice-commander of the 45th Space Wing. , which oversees launch operations at Cape Canaveral. Space Force Station and the nearby Kennedy Space Center.
In fact, the 30 successful Florida launches last year that sent payloads into orbit, and destinations beyond, set a record. Prior to 2020, the previous record for launches from the Space Coast reaching orbit was 29, a mark established in 1966.
But many suborbital launches, missile tests, and sounding rocket flights from Cape Canaveral were not counted in the orbital mission tally in the early years of the space age. In 1963, there were 133 known suborbital and orbital launches from the Space Coast, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.
“For the future, we plan to start in 2021,” Walton said in a virtual presentation to the National Space Club Florida committee. “We currently have 53 launches on our manifesto for this year, including one already in the books.”
The first launch of 2021 from Cape Canaveral was the successful liftoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 7 with the Turksat 5A communications satellite for Turkey.
“This is shaping up to be another remarkable year for launches on the Space Coast, with three human spaceflight missions, including two on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and one on Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft,” Walton said.
The historic first flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with astronauts was a highlight of the busy pace of launch activity last year. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched the Crew Dragon demonstration flight aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
Hurley and Behnken completed their two-month test flight to the International Space Station in early August, setting the stage for the first operational Crew Dragon mission, which took off on November 15 with four astronauts on board.
Other historic missions launched from Florida in 2020 include Solar Orbiter, a European-built spacecraft that will take the first photos of the Sun’s poles, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover and the first polar orbit launch from Cape Canaveral. since the 1960s, Walton said. .
Launch operators and rifle range officials completed most missions last year after the coronavirus pandemic forced many employees to work remotely, and launch crews practiced physical distancing and wore shirts masks to combat the spread of disease.
Officials from the 45th Space Wing projected 48 launches in 2020 early last year, an increase in missions primarily driven by SpaceX’s Starlink internet network.
Launch delays, a reality in the space industry, caused SpaceX and ULA to miss their planned launch numbers last year. It could happen again in 2021.
Military officials have streamlined processes to bypass the eastern chain faster between launches.
In recent decades, the range could only accommodate separate launches of 48 hours. With the introduction of automated flight safety systems, which would destroy a stray rocket if it flew out of its path, and the improvement in GPS-based tracking capabilities, there is a reduced demand for ground infrastructure and security guards for each launch.
This allowed the 45th Space Wing to downsize to support missions equipped with an automated flight safety system. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets currently fly with the automated safety system, and the United Launch Alliance plans to use a similar system on its next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket.
With the new technology, Space Force officials said the Eastern Rifle Range can now support missions from different launch platforms within 24 hours of each other.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, said the company is planning up to 48 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions in 2021. Up to a half-dozen of those launches are expected to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Calif. west of SpaceX. Shore launch area.
Eight of the 10 missions planned by the ULA this year will be launched from Cape Canaveral. A Delta 4-Heavy mission and an Atlas 5 mission are expected to launch from Vandenberg this year, with seven more Atlas 5s on the Florida launch schedule.
ULA said the new Vulcan rocket, designed to eventually replace the Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rocket families, could be ready to take off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight in late 2021.
The 53-launch screening includes the first flights of the Vulcan rocket and the heavy lifting device of NASA’s Space Launch System, a massive launcher designed to send crews back to the moon, Walton said. The first SLS demonstration flight, also scheduled for the end of 2021, will not carry any astronauts.
“The team is also prepared and very excited to participate in some inaugural ULA and NASA launches,” said Walton. “As you can see with 53 launches on the launch manifesto, we plan to make this another banner year without any plans to slow down in the near future.”
Assuming the forecast of 53 launches includes the eight missions ULA planned from Cape Canaveral and the first test launch of the SLS, the 45th Space Wing presumably expects SpaceX to complete the remaining 44 flights from the coast. Florida Space.
Given Musk’s goal of 48 launches in 2021, with a handful of those missions coming from Vandenberg, SpaceX could plan around that number of launches from Florida.
According to a Spaceflight Now tally, around 18 publicly known SpaceX launches are scheduled this year from the Space Coast for external customers, including two or three launches using SpaceX’s three-body Falcon Heavy rocket.
At least two Falcon Heavy launches are firmly scheduled this year, each carrying payloads for the Space Force. Other SpaceX flights will take crews and cargo to the space station, commercial communications satellites, and a GPS navigation spacecraft.
In addition to the Vulcan’s maiden flight, ULA’s Florida launch program includes two Atlas 5 launches with unmanned and manned test flights from the Boeing Starliner capsule, an Atlas 5 flight with the probe d NASA’s Lucy asteroid exploration and several Space Force Atlas 5s.
SpaceX officials have said missions for external clients take priority over the company’s internal Starlink missions. When there is room in the Falcon 9 manifesto, SpaceX says it builds enough Starlink satellites to launch batches of 60 as often as once every two weeks, or up to 26 missions per year.
Fourteen launches from the Space Coast last year put Starlink satellites into orbit, nearly half of all launches from Florida in 2020.
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