Small Space News Story Roundup 79

A slow news day again, so a couple of interesting smaller stories. 

SpaceX launches 10,000th Starlink Satellite on Tuesday

Today was a dual launch day split between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, with the Cape Canaveral launch being the second of the day. 

The first Starlink group (17-24) launched Tuesday from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at 1:19 a.m. EDT (0519 GMT or 10:19 p.m. PDT on March 16 local time). That mission's Falcon 9 booster (B1088) completed its 14th flight with a touchdown on the Pacific Ocean-positioned droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." 

The second Starlink group (10-46) departed from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Florida at 9:27 a.m. EDT (1327 GMT). Booster B1090 returned to Earth for the 11th time, landing on the "A Shortfall of Gravitas" (ASOG) droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This second launch marked SpaceX's 34th Falcon 9 mission of the year and 378th Starlink launch in its history. 

The milestone 10,000th Starlink was on board the first launch of the day from Vandenberg.  The megaconstellation now numbers 10,049 satellites, of which all but 10 are in working order, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. An additional 1,509 Starlink satellites were launched since May 2019, but have since reentered Earth's atmosphere and been destroyed. That's the price of flying in a low orbit to minimize delays.  

Is Artemis II Delayed Again? 

Maybe yes, maybe no. It's hard to know. 

After the roll back to the VAB to fix the helium leak problem that surfaced after the successful Wet Dress Rehearsal, there was an extensive Flight Readiness Review and it was widely reported they would roll the vehicle out to the pad on Thursday (March 19). After the discovery of another minor problem, an electrical harness for the flight termination system was in need of a repair, the announced rollback to pad 39 slipped one day to March 20th. Then it began to look like that extra day delay won't be needed. The latest updates to that are saying they might actually roll back to the pad on the 19th. 

Update for 5:50 p.m. ET on March 17: NASA is now saying that it may be able to hit its original target rollout date of March 19, thanks to faster-than-expected work on the Artemis 2 stack in the Vehicle Assembly Building. A final decision is expected on Wednesday (March 18).

The full Moon is seen behind the Artemis II SLS rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo taken before the mid-February WDR. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky