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For the first time in more than nine weeks, SpaceX performed a routine preflight test of the Falcon 9 known as static fire and verified that the rocket is ready for launch later this week.
With the exception of at least one completed booster qualification test at SpaceX’s development facility in McGregor, Texas, the Falcon 9’s August 25 static fire is the first since June 22. The enhanced Cargo Dragon space station resupply mission that the rocket will support will also be SpaceX’s first launch since June 30 – the company’s longest hiatus between launches since a three-month hiatus that began two years ago. years.
Now, just days before this drought ended, a SpaceX executive has partially explained why the company hasn’t launched a single Falcon rocket in about 60 days after completing a record. 20 orbital launches in the first half of 2021.
Speaking at the 2021 Space Symposium on August 24, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that the company has chosen to suspend Starlink missions (accounting for the vast majority of its launches in 2021) and to focus on preparing a new generation of satellites for flight. Believed to be called Starlink V1.5, these new satellites represent a relatively small design change except for one crucial addition: multiple lasers.
Since mid-2018, SpaceX launched its very first pair of prototype Starlink satellites – a spacecraft that largely performed as intended and provided a plethora of data, but looked almost nothing like Starlink spacecraft. V0.9 and V1.0 that SpaceX would eventually start launching in 2019. Nonetheless, they carried arrays of small lasers commonly known as Optical Intersatellite Links or OISL for short. Not radically different from hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optical cables that form the backbone of the Internet, lasers operating in the vacuum of space can effectively mirror the extraordinary bandwidth and performance offered by fiber connections – but wireless.
Instead of carefully insulated cables filled with tiny glass wires, which actually serve as a controlled environment for light-based communications, OISLs enable a similar feat by replacing cables with extraordinarily precise mechanisms capable of targeting lasers with submillimeter precision from tens or hundreds of kilometers. As a result, laser interconnects are quite complex and expensive devices – not something currently inexpensive to install on thousands of primarily affordability-focused satellites.
SpaceX, of course, has wanted to install unprecedentedly costly laser interconnects on thousands of Starlink satellites as long as the constellation has been publicly discussed. If achieved, this would create an extraordinary orbital mesh network that would allow Starlink to auto-route much of user communications without the need for a colossal network of tens of thousands of ground stations spanning every inch of Earth. – land, sea, ice, and all. A Starlink constellation with near-universal laser interconnects could also allow the constellation to not only match – but far beat – the latency of the best terrestrial fiber optic connections.
After effectively completing Starlink’s first “shell” of satellites earlier this year, SpaceX focused on preparing for Starlink’s polar launches from its facilities on the west and east coasts. While the first shell entirely lacked interconnects, SpaceX seems to have decided that all Starlink’s polar satellites will be launched with its own bespoke space lasers, even if that means delaying Starlink launches until those lasers are ready for action. Due to the fact that the vast majority of SpaceX launches in recent times have been its own Starlink missions, the company’s Falcon rockets simply haven’t had anything to launch.
That is expected to change on August 28, when a three-time Falcon 9 thruster launches a refurbished spacecraft on refueling from its second orbital space station – a first for SpaceX’s upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 vehicle. A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), SpaceX’s newest drone, will also support its first Falcon landing as part of the CRS-23, hoping to pick up the Falcon 9 B1064 booster for a fifth launch later this year.
Tune in around 3:20 a.m. (7:20 a.m. UTC) on Saturday, August 28 to watch SpaceX’s first launch in two months live.
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