Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess: Three launches a week have not been made in Florida since 2001
WASHINGTON – For the first time since 2001, Cape Canaveral will attempt to launch three rockets in a week. Planned for August 27 is a mission of the United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy National Reconnaissance Office. On August 28, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the SAOCOM 1B satellite for Argentina’s space agency, followed by another Falcon 9 Starlink launch on August 30.
If this succeeds, it will be historic, Brig said. Gen. Doug Schiess, commander of the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the space shores of Florida.
Three launches in a week have not been done in Florida since 2001, Scheiss said Aug. 25 during a video call with journalists.
That year, a Titan 4 launched on August 6, a Delta 2 on August 8 and the NASA Space Shuttle on August 10.
Schiess said that if the current manifesto holds, the Florida Space Coast will see 39 launches in 2020, compared to 18 launches in 2019 and 24 in 2018.
“And so the launches are constantly increasing, which is due to national security space missions and to a large extent by our commercial missions,” Schiess said.
The manifesto for the next three months has a Sept. 30 GPS satellite launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9, another NGO mission on a ULA Atlas 5 somewhere in October, the first operational launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon on October 23 and in November a ULA Atlas 5 launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule unlimited testmissy.
Polar launched the first since 1969
SpaceX will launch Argentina’s SAOCOM 1B – an Earth observation satellite designed to deliver radar images – to a polar orbit and will fly a southern orbit.
“It’s been decades since that was used,” Schiess said.
The last polar launch of the Cape was in February 1969 – the ESSA-9, also called TOS-G, a meteorological satellite on a three-stage Delta rocket, said a spokesman for the 45th Space Wing.
Following the launch of SAOCOM 1B, SpaceX will attempt to land the Falcon 9 booster on land at Landing Zone 1, instead of on a droneship at sea. The last time this happened was when SpaceX flew the CRS-20 Commercial Resupply Service mission to the International Space Station in March 2020.
Schiess said the southern trajectory flight for the polar orbit mission was approved by the Federal Aviation Administration and did not pose a threat to the populations of southern Florida or Cuba if the rocket flew over those areas.
“We have done a lot of work to make sure we are safe,” Schiess said.
SpaceX has launched satellites to polar orbits from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, but wanted to do these from the Cape, Schiess said, because their cargo “was processing here and it made more sense.”
The 45th Space Wing uses southern trajectories for submarine ballistic missile tests, Schiess said, noting that Vandenberg Air Force Base is the “prime location to launch to polar and I do not see that changing.”
