Only morning in the fullest definition of the word; for most of us it was "zero dark thirty" or "middle of the freakin' night!" It was 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509 GMT). Yes, I slept through it and watched the NASA Spaceflight replay on YouTube this morning. That video should start at about t-30 seconds, and I paid attention until the booster landed on the Cape at Landing Zone 2, amid speculation that might be the last landing there will be on LZ-2. That was at 7:35 on the onscreen timer (minutes and seconds since liftoff).
The mission was one of their Bandwagon ride share flights, and was carrying the Haven Demo payload for the private space station company Vast.
"The first step in our iterative approach towards building next-generation space stations, Haven Demo will test critical systems for Haven-1, including propulsion, flight computers and navigation software," Vast wrote in a description of the satellite.
Vast's Haven-1 will launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9, perhaps as soon as the second quarter of 2026. If that schedule holds, Haven-1 — which can support up to four astronauts at a time — will be the first standalone private space station in human history.
The other 17 payloads on this mission are naturally for other customers: South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD), the Berlin-based company Exolaunch, Turkey's Fergani Space, the weather-forecasting outfit Tomorrow Companies and Starcloud, which aims to build data centers in space.
As you'd guess from the mission name, Bandwagon-4 was the fourth mission in SpaceX's Bandwagon series to lift off. The company also operates another rideshare program called Transporter. The Transporter platform provides launches to sun-synchronous orbits, which are polar orbits that go over the same places on Earth at the same time every day so that the angle of sun and lighting is the same every day - but not every customer wants to launch to an SSO. It should be mentioned that the term polar orbit doesn't require the satellite go precisely over the north and south poles; deviations to 20 or 30 degrees are acceptable. Enter bandwagon, which flies to the second most requested orbit, at inclinations of up to approximately 45 degrees and satellites at altitudes of 550 to 605 kilometers.
There have been 14 Transporter rideshare missions, so clearly more popular than the Bandwagon series, which had its first flight on April 7, 2024. The Transporter-1 mission was January 24, 2021. It was an ambitious rideshare mission as one of SpaceX's veteran Falcon 9 boosters hoisted 143 small satellites — a new record for a single rocket
Good for Vast. I'm wondering how they're lifting the central hub of their 9 unit station? Is Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy certified for an extra-wide load or are they Starshiping it up or does it expand?
ReplyDeleteAnd, once again, SpaceX doing what others wished they could do. SpaceX has literally made space available to even private individuals (as represented by small companies and learning institutions that are getting their micro and mini satellites launched due to ride-sharing missions.)
Never seen a word written on that. The launch business is basically SpaceX and everyone else. When a "small American company" launches more than China, that says a LOT.
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