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CAP CANAVERAL, Florida – A SpaceX The Falcon 9 rocket lit up the pre-dawn sky early this morning (March 11) as it carried a new batch of 60 Starlink Internet satellites into orbit, before spiking its landing on a floating platform at sea .
The two stages Falcon 9 Booster took off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral at 3:13 a.m. EST (8:13 a.m. GMT). About 8.5 minutes later, the reusable first stage of the rocket returned to Earth for its sixth landing, landing on one of SpaceX’s drones. The floating platform, called “Just Read the Instructions,” was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles (630 kilometers) downstream.
It was a clear night in Florida for the second attempt of the mission. The launch was originally scheduled to take place on Tuesday evening (March 9), but has been pushed back so SpaceX can do more pre-launch checks. Forecasters from the US Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron predicted a 90% chance of favorable conditions for launch this morning, and Mother Nature delivered it.
Related: SpaceX’s Starlink satellite mega-constellation launches in photos
This latest liftoff marked SpaceX’s seventh mission in 2021 and Starlink’s 21st global 60-satellite launch. He played one of the most famous Falcon 9 early stages in the fleet – B1058.
Emblazoned with a now oozing NASA worm logo, the B1058 is the booster that delivered two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in May of last year, sending the orbital human space flight back to the ground. American with SpaceX. Mission Demo-2.
The veteran launcher also delivered a Dragon cargo spacecraft to the ISS, a communications satellite for the South Korean military and largest number of satellites ever launched in a single mission (Carrier-1). Today, B1058 transported its second stack of Starlink satellites.
The pre-dawn show marked the 110th overall flight of a Falcon 9 rocket and the 56th ebb of a Falcon 9 first stage. It was the sixth mission for this particular thruster, and SpaceX set a new record. fastest turnaround time for a rocket with so many flights under its belt.
The B1058 last flew on January 24, and departed from the same launch pad this morning, just 45 days later; the previous record for such a veteran recall was 59 days.
SpaceX relies heavily on its veteran rocket fleet, which has helped the company maintain its launch ambitions. However, SpaceX has always emphasized that while booster recovery is beneficial, the primary goal of every mission is to successfully deliver the payload into space.
The company first recovered a first stage in 2015, when a Falcon 9 booster landed on dry land on one of the company’s landing pads in Florida. SpaceX has since worked to better understand the recovery process and the amount of wear and tear that each launch puts on the rocket.
With each recovery attempt, the company was able to refine its process and reduce the times between flights. Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon musk said his long-term vision involves rockets that look like airplanes, in that they take off, land, refuel and take off quickly.
Musk said, for example, that a SpaceX goal is to launch, land, and then launch and land the same rocket again within 24 hours – a milestone that has yet to be met.
While SpaceX makes rocket landing easy, a recent anomaly shows it’s not always a slam dunk. On February 15, the company snapped a 24-recall recovery sequence when a Falcon 9 first stage, designated B1059, failed to land on a drone in the Atlantic Ocean after launching another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit.
The crash was blamed on “heat damage,” company officials elaborating on this during a recent teleconference. Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said one of the thruster’s engine protective covers had failed, allowing hot engine gases to escape into places it wasn’t. supposed to do it, causing a engine to be stopped during flight. This shutdown ultimately caused the rocket to miss its mark on the drone.
Related: See the evolution of SpaceX rockets in pictures
SpaceX upgraded its Falcon 9 rocket in 2018, giving the vehicle a series of improvements, including a more robust heat shield system, titanium grille fins, and a more durable inter-stage, to make it easier to reuse. Upgrades allowed the rocket to reload multiple times with little renovations in between.
The company said the Falcon 9 we see today may be able to fly at least 10 times with little to no refurbishment between flights and up to 100 times in total before retirement. But those numbers may not be set in stone. Instead, those goals could be more of a guideline that changes as the company refines its renovation process.
SpaceX has two boosters that are near the 10 mission milestone, having stolen a record eight times, and it’s possible that we may see one or both of them hit double-digit numbers this year. The company has big ambitions for 2021, with a goal of launching a total of 40 missions from its launch pads in California and Florida.
This morning’s mission marked the 76th SpaceX booster landing to date, and the 19th for “Read Instructions”.
To retrieve its returning boosters, SpaceX uses two enormous floating landing pads – “Of course, I still love you” and “Just Read the Instructions” – in addition to its landing pads, which allow the company to launch and land more rockets. Typically, drones see most of the action, as it takes more fuel reserves to get back to land than to go down to sea.
“Just Read the Instructions” is the more recent of the two ships. Originally stationed in California, the ship was moved to the East Coast in 2020, to help increase the rate of launch.
SpaceX has been planning a third drone for some time now, and it’s possible that this ship will serve the West Coast as the company aims to increase launches from its facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. There is no expected completion date on the third ship, but a recent job posting at a company for a drone recovery engineer suggests it could be in the near future.
Widen the mega-stellation
With this morning’s successful liftoff, SpaceX has now put more than 1,200 Starlink satellites into orbit, some of which are no longer operational. The company predicted its initial Starlink constellation to be 1440 strong but sought approval for dozens of thousands After. There are plenty of more launches to come as SpaceX fills this growing mega-constellation.
The company launched its Starlink program with one major goal: to connect the globe. To this end, SpaceX has designed a fleet of flat-panel broadband satellites that fly over the Earth, providing Internet coverage to users around the world.
SpaceX recently started taking preorders for its public deployment. Potential users can sign up for the service through a website, pay a deposit, and then be notified when coverage is available in their area.
Deployment is on a first come, first served basis, while the company conducts an extensive international and national beta testing phase. Prior to this launch, SpaceX deployed a service in Germany and New Zealand and is working to expand its existing service to the UK.
But that’s not all. Recent documents indicate that the company is seeking permission to expand its services to moving vehicles, including airplanes, boats and recreational vehicles. According to Musk, Starlink’s current user terminals, which facilitate access to satellites, are too big to put in cars, so for now it’s targeting bigger vehicles.
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Drop fairings
SpaceX’s dynamic duo of fairing boats, GO Ms Tree and GO Ms Chief, are still on the sidelines, undergoing maintenance at Port Canaveral, Florida. As such, SpaceX has deployed two of its Dragon recovery ships, GO Searcher and GO Navigator, to the planned recovery site.
Both boats have received upgrades that allow them to remove fairing parts from the water. The payload shroud is a shell-shaped material designed to protect satellites as their rocket moves through the atmosphere. SpaceX fairings are made up of two halves. At a designated point after launch, the two pieces break off and fall back to Earth.
Historically, the payload shroud was a one-off piece of equipment, thrown into the ocean after every mission. But SpaceX has worked to expand its reusability efforts and has been successful in salvaging and remaking fairing parts.
For this mission, the active fairing (the half that has the engines that drop it from the rocket) has flown once before, and the passive (or the other half) has flown twice before. Once recovered from the ocean, SpaceX inspects and refurbishes each fairing part.
SpaceX’s next mission is another Starlink mission, which could launch as early as this weekend. The company is also preparing its next astronaut mission, Crew-2, scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than April 22.
Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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