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The first bronze leg of the upcoming United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket arrived Friday on the Cape Canaveral launch pad, where it will be joined by five solid fuel boosters, a Centaur upper stage and a US communications satellite. Air Force in the coming weeks. take off scheduled for June 27th.
On a specially equipped trailer, the first stage of the rocket was routed by truck from the Atlas Space Operations Center to Cape Canaveral Air Base to the launch pad of Complex 41, where cranes were raised the scene 32 meters long. and placed on a mobile platform inside the facility of vertical integration.
The ULA workers will then install five solid rocket propellers, manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, around the base of the first floor of the Atlas 5. An upper floor of Centaurus will be placed at the top of the Atlas 5 and the construction of the rocket at Cape Canaveral will be limited by the addition, next month, of the fifth high-frequency communications satellite of the Air Force.
The AEHF 5 satellite will be the only payload of the Atlas 5 rocket when it takes off from Florida's Space Coast.
The launch is scheduled for June 27 in a two-hour window that will open at 6 pm EDT (10:00 GMT).
The Atlas 5, designated AV-083, will launch its most powerful version with five full-frame rocket boosters built by Aerojet Rocketdyne and a 5-meter-diameter (17.7-foot) fairing designed by Ruag Space, a configuration known as the Atlas 5-551 who flew nine times before. The five solid fuel engines will give an additional boost to the Atlas 5 first stage, powered by a Russian-made RD-180 main engine, which burns kerosene and liquid oxygen boosters.
The combined power of the thrusters and the main engine will give the Atlas 5 about 2.6 million pounds of thrust on takeoff.
The launch of June 27 will mark the first Atlas 5 flight of the year and the 80th launch of Atlas 5 since the launch of the rocket in August 2002. This is the third mission of ULA in 2019, after two Delta 4 launches earlier in the year.
Built by Lockheed Martin, the AEHF satellites provide secure communications services to the US military and work together in a network that, according to the Air Force, resists jamming, cyberattacks and even war nuclear. AEHF spacecraft are positioned in a geostationary orbit more than 22,000 km (36,000 km) above the equator, using a cross-linked architecture that allows satellites to relay signals to each other without transmitting to ground stations.
The launch of the AEHF 5 satellite comes after the launch of four previous AEHF spacecraft in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2018, all on Atlas 5 rockets.
Once the Atlas 5 rocket carrying the AEHF 5 satellite takes off from Cape Canaveral, the launch campaign for the next Atlas 5 mission will begin in July with the stacking of a new rocket designed to send the CST-100 capsule into orbit. Boeing Starliner. unmanned test flight to the International Space Station.
The Starliner test flight is scheduled for August 17 and the demonstration mission will pave the way for crew launches using the Atlas 5 rocket and the Starliner capsule, possibly by the end of the year.
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