Tonight's Starlink Group 6-32 mission from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral is going to be the 19th flight of a Falcon 9 booster, weather and all the rest cooperating. The workhorse is going to be Booster B1058, which has been the one chosen to be the first booster to try at the next level for a while now. B1058 flew for the record 18th time less than two months ago, the night of November 3rd.
That's right. The record has stood for less than two months.
The launch window has changed while I was putting this piece together. The launch time is being quoted as 12:02 AM EST December 23rd, or 0502 UTC. The launch window closes at 3:00 AM.
B1058 before her first flight, the Demo 2 mission in May of 2020, which was the first manned launch from the US since the end of the Shuttle program in 2011. Brand new, gleaming white. Image credit: SpaceX.
Tonight's launch is going to be covered live by NASA Spaceflight.com. At the moment, it says coverage is going live at 11:20 PM.
No other company in aerospace development has SpaceX's track record of not doing the normal thing. And they experiment with their own stuff, not like what ULA is doing with Vulcan.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing if they can keep the pace up or even increase it over the next year.
I always thought the way they developed the landing technology was genius. The customer's mission gets 100% priority until they throw away the booster. At that point, it's garbage, the customer doesn't care about it, so pardon us while we experiment on the garbage pile, to see if we can learn anything from it.
DeleteI get the impression, ULA practically wants the customer to pay for that.
That is Legacy Aerospace's way of doing things, charge the customer for experimentation.
DeleteJust think how advanced rocket engines would have been if Aerojet-Rocketdyne had kept experimenting and improving in the SpaceX way without being forced to. No need to rely on Russian engines, cheap and powerful US built engines decades before the Merlin.
L3 acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne doesn’t give me any warm fuzzies in terms of hope. L3 has a record of knowingly providing bad product to customers and they burn .gov money just as well as anyone else.
DeleteBy the way, have you heard anything about Lagniappe's Lair? He's not updated his blog for a veeery long time.
ReplyDeleteNo, I got nothing. Anyone reading here know anything?
DeleteAs of June he was doing well in his new digs in CA, he just has no internet. Anything newer I do not know.
DeleteBoy needs to get a Starlink, dammit.
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