Today's SpaceX Starlink 4-19 mission checked off a few major milestones in their books.
- Perhaps the most interesting is that Booster B1060 completed its 13th mission with a flawless launch and landing. B1060 becomes the first orbital booster in the world to fly 13 missions, since nobody else is recovering and reusing boosters - at least not this big.
- This was the 100th reuse of a Falcon booster since the first time in March 2017.
- It was SpaceX’s 50th consecutive successful Falcon booster landing and Falcon 9’s 130th consecutively successful launch campaign. The current world record for consecutive successful launches is 133, set by variants of Russia’s Soyuz/R-7 rocket, so four more successful launches moves that record to SpaceX.
Screen capture of B1060 about 15 seconds after successfully landing on the drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG). Taken from SpaceX's feed.
Since its debut in June 2020, B1060 has supported three commercial launches (GPS III SV03, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2) and nine Starlink launches, helping to deliver around 160 metric tons (~350,000 lb) of satellites to orbit in two years. ... Starlink 4-19’s payload will be another 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites weighing around 16 tons (~35,250 lb), likely raising the total number of working Starlink satellites in orbit above 2400.
As was pointed out Tuesday, this is a busy weekend. About 22 hours after today's launch (12:08:50 PM EDT), the action shifts west to California with a launch at 10:19 AM EDT on Saturday.
Following Starlink 4-19, SpaceX confirmed on Thursday that another Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch a set of rideshare payloads and Germany’s SARah-1 radar satellite from Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB), California at 7:19 am PDT (14:19 UTC) on Saturday, June 18th. SpaceX won the contract to launch all three planned SARah satellites in 2013, at which point the first launch was expected to occur in 2018. The payloads are light enough that the mission’s unknown Falcon 9 booster will be able to boost back to shore and land just a thousand feet from where it lifted off after carrying them most of the way to space.
From there, the action shifts back to Cape Canaveral, this time from Launch Complex 40, their "other" launch pad. This launch, almost exactly 14 hours later, includes one or more satellites sharing the ride but that can't be talked about; they're "black" (very secret) military/security satellites.
Just half a day after SARah-1, a third Falcon 9 rocket could lift off from LC-40 – SpaceX’s second East Coast pad – with a single spare Globalstar-2 communications satellite and one or more secret military satellites at 12:27 am EDT (04:27 UTC) on Sunday, June 19th. Falcon 9 booster B1061 is likely assigned to the launch and was spotted on a transporter – new, expendable upper stage already installed – on June 14th, probably heading from SpaceX’s main integration hangar to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s (CCSFS) LC-40 pad.
This will mark three successive Falcon 9 launches in right around 36 hours and 16 minutes. All of them can be watched on SpaceX's "Launches" website. The video at that website can be opened directly in YouTube if you prefer and SpaceX's YouTube channel has a "Missions" page where previous missions can be viewed later.
Not tired of SpaceXing, not at all.
ReplyDeleteJust watched the SARah mission out of Vandy and watched them stick the landing on that one, too.
DeleteThey're really the only ones doing anything space-related regularly.
One thing I have noted lately about the landings of the Falcon 9s is that they seem to be landing almost dead center of the landing site. I am sure they are tweaking their software which will be a basis for the SuperHeavy Booster to be caught in the arms of the launch site tower.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. They seem to land on the X in SpaceX almost all the time - inside "the 10 ring." Considering that a Falcon 9 with one engine burning has too much thrust to hover, and they have to calculate where the center is going to be from pretty far up in order to reach zero speed at zero altitude, it's all the more remarkable. Yeah, they can tell where the center is going to be in X and Y, but Z depends on the waves and waves do whatever they feel like.
DeleteAmazing, truly amazing. Now I know how my one elderly uncle felt when we landed on the Moon. He'd seen the Wright brothers fly as a small child, and he was crying when the Eagle landed....
ReplyDeleteI know the feeling - it brought tears to my eyes to watch the twin boosters to Falcon Heavy land simultaneously on LZ1 and LZ2. Even though I knew exactly how they accomplished that tremendous feat, I was gobsmacked at what they had done!!
DeleteI still marvel at the way they landed them staggered by about a half second. Just aesthetically beautiful.
DeleteIf any of you look REAL close, not only will you find that the booster lands "within the X-ring" every time, but also lands with the same ORIENTATION as well! This is critical, as the Starship is going to have to land within 3 degrees of proper orientation if the OLIT's "chopsticks" are going to catch the booster or the starship for landing.
ReplyDeleteMany say it can't be done, but these are the same nattering nabobs of negativity that said you couldn't reuse a booster, much less land one in the middle of the ocean on a floating platform!!
Sure, Soyuz had the most launches (for right now!), but how man Soyuz's were reused? That statistic is apples compared to oranges. In reality, a useless comparison...
I'm still waiting for SpaceX to light the booster and roar off into the sky. What a spectacle THAT will be!!