Sixty more Starlink Internet satellites are ready to thrill on the 100th flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9L launcher from Cape Canaveral on Sunday night, and on the seventh flight of SpaceX’s reusable “Fleet Leader” booster.
The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station from Pad 40 to EST Sunday (0256: 21 GMT Monday) at 9:56:21 p.m. The mission will explode in less than 34 hours after the previous flight of SpaceX, the Falcon 9 launched from California, which is in orbit of an oceanographic satellite designed to measure sea level rise.
Launching the Falcon 9 on Saturday with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freelich ocean satellite, SpaceX was SpaceX’s 22nd mission in 2020, breaking the company’s record for most launches in a calendar year. Sunday’s flight will expand the record.
While the Falcon 9 launch from California is flying with a factory-fresh first-stage booster, the flying booster from Florida will be used six times before the launch of SpaceX on Sunday night. The rocket’s seventh flight will set a new record for SpaceX’s rocket reuse program, breaking the mark set by the same booster on its sixth mission in August.
The rocket, designed to launch on Sunday – known as B1049 – entered Cape Canaveral in September 2018 with the launch of the Telstar 18 VANTAGE geostationary communications satellite. It relaunched in January 2019 from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California with 10 Iridium and Voice Is and Data Relay satellites.
The booster flew again in May 2019 with the first set of SpaceX’s 60 Starlink Internet satellites, followed by three more Starlink missions on January 6, June 3 and August 18.
SpaceS Booster tweeted on Saturday, “This launch will make him the leader of the fleet.”
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, says the latest version of the Falcon 9 booster can fly 10 times without any major upgrades, and 100 times with periodic overhauls.
U.S. According to the Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron, the weather at Cape Canaveral on Sunday night has a 60 percent chance of favorable weather. The main weather concern is with cumulus clouds and disrupted weather associated with scattered showers on Florida’s Space Coast.
SpaceX tested the rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines at 4pm EST (2100 GMT) on Saturday. The engine kept burning for several seconds while the hold-down clamps held the rocket firmly to the pad 40, causing a low tilt on the Cape Canaveral spaceport.
The launch team originally planned to test the rocket as early as Friday before a possible launch attempt on Saturday night, but dropped the test in the final moments before SpaceX ignition. After removing the propellant from the rocket, SpaceX refilled the Falcon 9 during a practice countdown on Saturday afternoon, which ended in a success-test firing at 4 p.m.
SpaceX will re-load kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants into the rocket from 9:21 pm EST (0221 GMT) on Sunday. Automatic countdown, propellant loading, final manual system checkout and T-minus 3 seconds will proceed by pushing before ordering to light nine Merlin 1D engines.
The 229-foot (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket will open the controls to allow the Pad 40 to move away from its Merlin’s main engines with 1.7 million pounds of thrust.
Moving northeast from Cape Canaveral, the first phase of the rocket will be about a minute and a half away in a booster mission, aimed at landing on the SpaceX drone “Ourse Course I Will Love You”, which is about 400 miles (650 kilometers) northeast. Launch site.
The Booster T + Plus is scheduled to land on a floating platform at 8 minutes, 44 seconds before the Falcon 9’s upper stage engine shuts down. According to a mission timeline released by SpaceX, the upper phase will deploy 60+ flat-panel Starlink satellites in T + plus 14 minutes, 44 seconds.
The rocket will aim to place satellites in an elliptical orbit between 132 miles (213 kilometers) and 227 miles (366 kilometers), with an equatorial tilt of 53 degrees.
The quarter-ton satellites, built by SpaceX in Reshmond, Washington, Washington, will launch lightning-generated solar arrays and bring their krypton ion thrusters into orbit at an operational altitude of 1,341 miles (50,550 kilometers). More than 800 other Starlink relay stations to beam broadband Internet signals in the most populous world.
With the launch on Sunday, SpaceX will launch 955 Starlink satellites from May 2019.
SpaceX plans to launch an initial block of about 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit 341 miles above Earth. Founded by billionaire Elon Musk, the company has regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission to operate a fleet of 12,000 small Starlink broadband stations operating in low-band, Ka-band and V-band frequencies.
There are also initial plans for a larger fleet of 30,000 additional Starlink satellites, but a network of that size has not been authorized by the FCC.
SpaceX says the Starlink network – designed for low-latency Internet service – has entered beta testing in several US states and Canada.
Last month, SpaceX launched its “Nothing Better Beta” testing program, the company said in a post on its website. “Service invitations were sent to those who have requested availability updates on Starlink.com and who live in serviceable areas. A few weeks ago, Canada gave Starlink regulatory approval and last week SpaceX began serving parts of southern Canada. “
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