SpaceX launches 60 more Starlink satellites on 100th Falcon 9 flight – Spaceflight Now

by



[ad_1]

A Falcon 9 rocket pulls away from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base on Tuesday evening. Credit: SpaceX

The 100th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket put 60 satellites into orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink network on Tuesday night, adding another building block to a planned fleet of thousands of solar-powered space relay stations to broadcast connectivity broadband worldwide.

Tuesday night’s successful mission also set a new record for SpaceX’s rocket reuse program – a record that could be broken again in a matter of months if SpaceX maintains its feverish launch pace. For the first time, a reusable Falcon 9 booster has made its seventh space trip and is back on Tuesday night’s flight.

The Falcon 9 rocket fired its nine kerosene-powered Merlin 1D engines and lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base at 9:13:12 p.m. EST Tuesday (02:13:12 GMT Wednesday). The 229-foot-high (70-meter) launcher passed through a broken cloud layer above the platform and exploded northeast of Cape Canaveral to align with the mission’s targeted orbital plane in the Starlink network.

The first-stage thruster of the 15-stage rocket pulled away from the upper stage of the Falcon 9 about two and a half years after take-off, setting a course for a controlled landing on SpaceX’s drone. “Of course, I t ‘still love’ positioned several hundred kilometers northeast of Cape Canaveral in the Atlantic Ocean,

The booster – designated B1049 in SpaceX’s rocket inventory – re-ignited its mid-engine for a braking maneuver just before touchdown, then released a landing gear before settling on the drone’s deck. The seemingly flawless landing punctuated the seventh mission of the B1049, making it SpaceX’s “leader of the fleet.”

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, said the latest version of the Falcon 9 booster could fly 10 times without any major renovations, and maybe 100 times with periodic revisions.

Along with its reused first stage booster, the Falcon 9 was launched with a recycled shell-shaped payload fairing, half of which flew on two previous missions. The other half of the fairing was a veteran from a previous launch.

Two salvage ships were sent out to sea to retrieve the fairing halves for Tuesday night’s mission after they parachuted to Earth from space.

As the booster and fairing hulls descended back to Earth, the Falcon 9’s upper stage guided the 60 flat-screen Starlink satellites into a transfer orbit tilted 53 degrees from the equator. About 15 minutes after takeoff, the upper stage released retaining rods to allow the stack of 60 spacecraft to fly freely from the rocket over the North Atlantic Ocean.

The Falcon 9 aimed to place the satellites in an elliptical orbit between 132 miles (213 kilometers) and 227 miles (366 kilometers). A member of SpaceX’s launch team confirmed during a mission audio loop that the rocket made an orbital insertion on the target.

The launch was previously scheduled for Saturday night, then postponed until Sunday, when SpaceX canceled a launch attempt over concerns about “mission assurance.” SpaceX bypassed a launch opportunity on Monday due to a forecast of poor conditions in the Falcon 9 Booster’s sea landing zone, setting the stage for Tuesday’s countdown.

Tuesday night’s launch was the 23rd SpaceX mission of 2020, extending the company’s record-breaking rate of flights. SpaceX’s previous record for most launches in a year was 21 missions in 2018.

The exhaust plume from nine Merlin 1D main engines was apparent when the Falcon 9 rocket passed through the clouds over Cape Canaveral on Tuesday evening. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now

The quarter-ton Starlink satellites, built by SpaceX in Redmond, Wash., Were to deploy power-generating solar panels and prime their krypton-ion thrusters to begin raising their orbits to an operational altitude of 341 miles (550 kilometers), where they join over 800 other Starlink relay stations to broadcast broadband Internet signals to most populated countries.

With the launch on Sunday, SpaceX has deployed 955 Starlink satellites in orbit.

SpaceX plans to operate a first block of about 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbits 341 miles above Earth. The company, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has obtained regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission to eventually bring into service a fleet of up to 12,000 small Starlink broadband stations operating on Ku-band, Ka-band and in V-band.

There are also preliminary plans for an even larger fleet of an additional 30,000 Starlink satellites, but a network of this size has not been cleared by the FCC.

SpaceX says the Starlink network – designed for low-latency internet service – has entered a beta test phase in several US states and Canada.

“Last month, SpaceX launched its ‘Better Than Nothing Beta’ testing program,” the company said in a post on its website. “Service invitations have been sent to some of those who have requested availability updates on Starlink.com and who live in serviceable areas. A few weeks ago, Canada granted regulatory approval to Starlink and last week, SpaceX rolled out the service to parts of southern Canada.

The “invitation-only” beta testing program is focused on testing Starlink connectivity in rural and remote areas of the northern United States and southern Canada, said Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer who co-hosted the Company launch webcast Tuesday night.

“As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and availability will improve dramatically,” Tice said.

The latency of SpaceX projects on the Starlink network will drop to around 16 to 19 milliseconds by mid-2019, Tice said.

“At our current rate, we plan to expand our beta significantly very early next year, at the end of January-February,” she said.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.



[ad_2]

Source link