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SpaceX has ordered additional inspections on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is expected to launch 64 small satellites, a decision that should keep the launcher on the ground for several days until the end of Thanksgiving holiday. Saturday, officials said.
The Falcon 9 was scheduled to take off Monday from Vandenberg – a military base about 140 km northwest of Los Angeles – but SpaceX announced the postponement in a tweet on Saturday.
"Quitting Spaceflight's SSO-A: SmallSat Express launch attempt on Monday to conduct additional pre-flight inspections," SpaceX tweeted. "Once completed, we will confirm a new launch date."
The Falcon 9 rocket will launch 64 satellites as part of a carpool mission booked by Spaceflight, a smallsats launch broker based in Seattle. The 64 payloads, ranging from a Rubik's cube to a refrigerator, belong to various US and international operators, including the US government, research institutes and commercial enterprises.
The launch will set a record for the largest number of satellites ever deployed in orbit on a US rocket, but it will not reach the world record of 104 satellites launched on an Indian rocket last year.
The upcoming launch is also notable as it will be SpaceX's first flight to reuse the same Falcon 9 first-floor booster a third time.
Spaceflight's SSO-A Carpool Call Reminder flew twice from Florida: May 11th from NASA's Kennedy Space Center with Bangladesh's Bangabandhu 1 communications satellite, and again on August 7th from the base Cape Canaveral aerial with Indonesian telecom payload Merah Putih.
On both occasions, the first leg landed on the SpaceX drone in the Atlantic Ocean and returned to port for inspections, limited refurbishment and reuse.
SpaceX relaunched a first-stage launch launcher previously flown 17 times, most recently at the Kennedy Space Center launch in Florida on Thursday with Qatar's Es'hail 2 communications satellite. But all the first steps to date have only happened twice.
This is changing with SpaceX's next mission as the company aims to reuse 10 Falcon 9 boosters up to 10 times without renovation, and up to 100 times with periodic revisions. The latest version of the Falcon 9 model, commonly referred to as the "Block 5" version, includes upgrades from previous models to facilitate the reuse of rockets.
SpaceX plans to find the first leg aboard its west coast drone in the Pacific Ocean after Spaceflight's multi-satellite launch.
Several people working with the carpool mission payloads said the delay was ordered by SpaceX to resolve the rocket related issues.
A company owner owning payloads should carry out an orbit around the rocket Falcon 9 said the launch would be postponed after Thanksgiving, and another client of the rocket SSO-A said in a tweet that the flight would be delayed by five to three hours. six days.
"Unfortunately, the launch (of Spaceflight SSO-A) was delayed from 5 to 6 days due to additional inspections of the SpaceX rocket," tweets officials on an account associated with the MinXSS 2 CubeSat mission flying into orbit on the Falcon 9.
The satellites on board the flight include 15 microsatellites and 49 CubeSats. Seven CubeSats were not ready in time for a launch in November, and technicians replaced them with a ballast that will remain in Spaceflight's dual deployment modules, ensuring that mass and balance calculations for the launch are unaffected, according to Jeff Roberts, Spaceflight's mission leader for SSO- A Mission.
The microsatellites and CubeSats come from 17 countries: United States, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Finland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Germany, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Poland, Canada, Brazil and India.
Rockets usually launch with one or two primary satellites and sometimes carry additional secondary payloads to fill the unused capacity, but the launch of SSO-A follows a different pattern.
There is no main payload in the SSO-A mission. Spaceflight purchased all of the Falcon 9's launch capacity in 2015 and satellite owners reserved their launch contracts with Spaceflight, not with SpaceX.
Spaceflight has already negotiated carpool launches for rockets, including the Indian PSLV and the Russian Soyuz, but these missions flew over launches carrying larger satellites into the main payload slot.
The carpool agreement allows satellite owners to split the cost of launching a rocket, instead of paying for the entire mission.
The Falcon 9 rocket was tested Thursday night at Vandenberg by SpaceX, as part of a pre-flight countdown test routine at the Space Launch Complex 4-East complex. The technicians intended to return the rocket to a nearby hangar for attachment to the SSO-A payload stack already encapsulated in the Falcon 9 front fascia.
Spaceflight's unique space-based aircraft carrier modules, named the upper and lower free flyers, will separate from the Falcon 9's upper deck in an orbit some 355 km (575 km) high after Vandenberg took off.
"We call them free flyers because that's exactly what they are. There is no propulsion system on board. They simply have all the avionics and distributors to command the deployment, "Roberts said.
The top free flyer is based on a commonly used secondary payload adapter, called the ESPA ring, built by Moog. The lower free flight is Spaceflight's own design, according to Roberts.
Four of the microsatellites launched as part of the SSO-A mission will separate directly from Falcon 9's second-stage adapter plates after it enters orbit. The other 60 will roll out among the free flyers in a timed sequence over the next five hours.
The free flying modules will deploy the drag sails after satellite deployments to help bring the distributors back into the Earth's atmosphere.
"Everyone is integrated, the entire structure has been encapsulated and SpaceX has flipped (flipped) the encapsulated structure horizontally in order to mate with the rocket," Roberts told Spaceflight Now.
With all satellites on board free flight modules, there is no plan to delay launch if engineers detect a problem with one of the payloads. It is a practical approach designed to make sure that the problem of one satellite does not affect others.
"At this point, the train is still leaving the station," Roberts said in an interview.
"I'm really excited and that's about what the team feels, too," said Roberts. "This is the culmination of nearly three years of work by this team. Over the last 60 days, many people on this team worked 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Efforts to achieve this for us and for all our customers.
"We are excited to see this go into orbit and succeed."
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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