SpaceX recovery drone ship Of Course I Still Love You transited the Panama Canal on Friday the 25th and as of today was traveling northwest to Long Beach.
As of Friday, Mighty Servant 1 self-reported an ETA of July 6th.
Photo from SpaceXFleet.com on Twitter.
The stated reason for deploying OCISLY to California is to cover more polar orbit launches from Vandenberg SFB, and that's an important step to improve the availability of their Starlink service. That's all understandable, but it leaves Florida with only one recovery drone, Just Read the Instructions (JRTI), and a busier launch cadence. There is another drone ship being built which could be used in the Atlantic along with JRTI named A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG). It appears that ASOG is being built in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, but isn't remotely close to being ready to travel to Florida. Gavin Cornwell of SpaceXFleet Tweets that we're nearing three years since the work on ASG was announced.
Teslarati reports that SpaceX has filed papers with the FCC which indicate that SpaceX intends to perform dedicated polar Starlink launches from California and Florida – though the latter missions will take a significant performance hit to make that happen. It was just last August that they launched the first payload into a polar orbit from the Cape in 60 years. That launch did a Return To Launch Site profile for the Falcon 9 booster, so we were able to watch it going out and coming back.
Friday's planned launch of the Transporter 2 rideshare mission from the Cape was delayed until this Tuesday at 2:56 PM EDT or 1856 UTC; it's scheduled for a RTLS booster recovery, too. The stated reason for the delay was additional time for pre-launch check outs. Launching a large number of satellites made by different manufacturers means getting everything to communicate over some sort of digital bus on the launcher. That can always be challenging
We had the capability in the LV and Payload Accommodation to launch two, but never used it. All our customers were the big 10,000~12,000 pound class satellites to a GTO. Would have been fun to do a "ride share" with AMSAT, but I was the only one interested in it....
ReplyDelete