Today we got to see the rarest of spaceflight missions, a Falcon 9 mission that does not recover the booster. Deliberately. These are only performed when the customer for the mission wants an orbit that an F9 can't achieve without using the fuel that would allow the vehicle to decelerate and land under control.
I know they do it occasionally but a quick search of the blog shows the last time I posted about them doing it was in November of 2022. From the customer's view, the launch costs more than if SpaceX recovers the booster, I just think that if it was much more, they'd go to another provider. The booster's final flight today was its 32nd mission. Fleet leader B1067 flew its 36th flight back on July 9.
Interestingly, if not ironically, the customer paying to launch the payload is Northrop Grumman, which is about as experienced in the space business as any company.
The mission was to launch a satellite "rescue" spacecraft called MRV-MEV, because it's sending up a Mission Robotic Vehicle and three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs). These spacecraft will be operated by SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Virginia-based aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. The launch was from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, SLC-40, this evening at 5:14 PM EDT.
The "root cause" reason for using all of the fuel the F9 can hold is that the heavy satellite is bound for geosynchronous orbit 22,236 miles up.
At this altitude, orbital speed matches the velocity of our planet's rotation, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over the same patch of ground continuously. For this reason, GEO is a popular destination for spy, communications and weather satellites.
The new mission will work to extend the lives of such satellites. The MRV is equipped with two 10-foot-long (3 meters) robotic arms, each built by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It will use those arms to attach the MEPs — the first three ever to launch — to three separate satellites in GEO.
"Once installed, the MEP uses electric propulsion to provide orbit control and momentum unloading for a client satellite," Northrop Grumman wrote in an MEP fact sheet. "The MEP is controlled by the customer via a self-contained C- or Ku-band telemetry and command system, and [is] capable of providing up to eight years of life extension for a typical 2,000 kg satellite in GEO."
The refueling system on the satellites is "Northrop Grumman-developed Passive Refueling Module (PRM), the first refueling interface standard approved by the U.S. Space Force, which enables MRV to be refueled in orbit,"
A nine minute video of the launch through the "nominal orbital insertion" can be found here.
I remember reading and posting about the first rescue of a satellite in GEO orbit back in 2019, and it surprised me mildly to see images posted that looked a lot like the images of today's payload. Here's a post from April of 2021 called, “The Age of Reusability in Space is Dawning”.
Following its launch in summer 2026, Northrop Grumman’s Mission Robotic Vehicle (left) will install Mission Extension Pod (right) jetpacks to extend the lives of client satellites in geosynchronous orbit. MRV also can perform inspection, relocation, repairs, upgrades, and other missions yet to be imagined. Illustration credit: Northrop Grumman. Illustration sourced and caption from: SpaceFlight Now
And we take another step towards becoming a truly space-faring species.
ReplyDeleteElectric propulsion?!? In a Vacuum? new one to me.
ReplyDeleteThe first ones I remember reading about were in the 1960s. They worked by ionizing gas (usually Xenon) and using it accelerated by the electric field as the propellant. That's still the most common form.
DeleteWith C- or Ku-band telemetry I would opt C-band with the weather we have been having. I would like to see video of an attachment jetpack to a satellite. How much wobble and how fragile is the bird? I hope it works.
ReplyDeleteI expect that video will be available, but I have no idea when. And I suspect that's the reason they have both C and Ku band downlinks. In the 2019 mission (first link in the paragraph just above the picture), that was the first time they grabbed a satellite out in the GEO and moved it to the desired orbit. It's "stop motion" animation, but since it's the same company, I figure it's probably the same expertise in figuring out how to move it.
DeleteHmmm. If you are launching a vehicle that can refuel rockets in space, why expend a booster? Just launch two and have one refuel the other...
ReplyDeleteThe booster uses massively more fuel to land than several of these use for adjusting satellite orbits
DeleteJonathan
P.S. I suspect the booster also cost far less than one of these satellites.
Right you are, Jonathon. Incredibly massively more fuel for the booster than the little ion thrusters on the satellites.
DeleteThis booster had 32 launches. There's a persistent rumor that SpaceX's charges for a flight where the booster is in reuse are around $35 Million each. We can't really know their true costs, if fuel is included and the whole picture, but that's just around $1.1 Million per launch. So they make ~34 times their costs per launch?
And the other thing we see everywhere is that Starship is going to reduce that cost per pound of payload to about 1/10 of the current costs.
Reliability is also a value from SpaceX, and at some point they may command a premium.
ReplyDelete