With a Falcon 9 rocket launch Friday, SpaceX 57 added more satellites to the Starlink broadband fleet and deployed a pair of piggyback commercial Earth imaging reconnaissance satellites for BlackSky, wrapping up a busy week that began with SpaceX’s return of two NASA astronauts to Earth and the first low-altitude test height of the next-generation Starship car.
The 59 commercial satellites landed at 1:12:05 AM EDT (0512: 05 GMT) on top of a Falcon 9 rocket from path 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Nine Merlin 1D engines flashed to life with a deep rumble throwing the 229-foot (70-meter) rocket into the air with 1.7 million pounds of steering. After returning with a trajectory to the northeast of the Space Coast in Florida, the Falcon 9 flew into the stratosphere and trained a brilliant orange exhaust plume before launching its first stage engines two-and-a-half minutes after stopping.
Seconds later, the first stage booster dropped away from the second stage of the Falcon 9 to begin a cruise to the spacex drone ship, parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral.
The Merlin engine in the second stage ignited twice to maneuver the Starlink and BlackSky satellites to an approximately circular orbit about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. Meanwhile, the Falcon 9’s first stage booster flew to a propulsive landing on SpaceX’s rocket recovery ship, a football field-sized platform positioned nearly 400 miles (about 630 kilometers) downrange from the Kennedy Space Center.
Two BlackSky Earth-imaging satellites, each weighing about 121 pounds (55 kilograms), deployed from the top of the stack of the Starlink spacecraft more than an hour into the mission. BlackSky booked the launch for its satellites through Spaceflight, a Seattle-based rideshare broker, and used space in the Falcon 9 rocket’s loadload compartment provided by SpaceX.
Read our previous story for background on BlackSky and SpaceX’s offered rideshare service.
BlackSky launches a fleet of Earth observation satellites designed to monitor changes across the Earth’s surface, and feeds near real-time data on geospatial intelligence to governments and corporate clients. The two microsatellites on Friday’s mission are designated Global 7 and Global 8, but they are actually the fifth and sixth operational satellites in the BlackSky fleet, allowing the company to eventually count more than 50 satellites, depending on customer demand. .
The BlackSky satellites were built by LeoStella, a joint venture between Spaceflight Industries and Thales Alenia Space, a major European satellite manufacturer. LeoStella’s production facility is located in Tukwila, Washington, a suburb of Seattle.
The satellites have electrothermal propulsion systems that use water as a propellant. Each of the current generation BlackSky Global spaceships can capture up to 1,000 color images per day, with a resolution of about 3 feet (1 meter).
With the piggyback loadloads gone, the top stage of the Falcon 9 spanned for the release of the 57 Starlink satellites at 2:45 AM EDT (0645 GMT). Live video beaming back to Earth from the Falcon 9 rocket shows the flat-panel satellites flying free from the upper stage as they tower about 250 miles across the Pacific Ocean at Baja California.
All 57 Starlink broadband satellites launched this morning from the Kennedy Space Center have successfully separated from their Falcon 9 rocket in orbit.
This brings the total number of Starlinks launched since May 2019 to 595 satellites. https://t.co/T8cU2Vl2bf pic.twitter.com/xp8EJwD69d
– Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) August 7, 2020
SpaceX declared success, concluding the 90th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, and the 13th Falcon 9 launch of the year. It was also the 57th time that SpaceX has returned a reusable Falcon first stage booster, and it marked the fifth flight of the booster designated B1051.
The launch early Friday came less than five days after the return of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to Earth with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, and completed the ship’s first mission with crew members on board. The test flight sets the stage for NASA’s Crew Dragon certification for regular flights for crew rotation to the International Space Station.
On Tuesday, SpaceX conducted a low-altitude “hop” test of a prototype of the company’s next-generation Starship space vehicle.
SpaceX’s Starlink network is designed to provide high-speed, low-latency Internet service worldwide. With Friday’s mission, SpaceX 595 launched flat-panel Starlink spacecraft since the launch of full-scale orbital network in May 2019, making the company the owner of the largest fleet of satellites in the world.
Each of the flat panel satellites weighs about a quarter of a ton, and are built by SpaceX in Redmond, Washington. Once in orbit, they will deploy solar panels to begin producing electricity, and then activate their krypton ion thrusters to increase their altitude to about 341 miles, or 550 kilometers.
SpaceX says it needs 24 launches to provide Starlink Internet coverage across almost the entire populated world, and 12 launches can enable coverage from higher latitude regions, such as Canada and the northern United States.
The launch Friday will be the 10th mission to launch Starlink satellites, but the Starlink spacecraft deployment at the first dedicated launch of the network was designed to demonstrate the performance of satellite and loadload. SpaceX has not said if any of those satellites could be included in the operational fleet.
The Falcon 9 rocket can launch a maximum of 60 Starlink satellites – each weighing about a quarter of a ton – at a single Falcon 9 launch. But launches with secondary payloads, such as BlackSky’s new Earth imaging satellites, may carry less Starlinks to fit the ride-sharing passengers’ room on the rocket.
The initial phase of the Starlink network will number 1,584 satellites, according to SpaceX’s registration with the Federal Communications Commission. But SpaceX plans to launch thousands more satellites, depending on market demand, and the company has regulatory approval from the FCC to operate up to 12,000 Starlink relay nodes in low-Earth orbit.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, says the Starlink network could earn revenue to fund the company’s ambition for interplanetary spaceflight, and eventually establish a human settlement on Mars.
Fans of SpaceX who slept through coding on the Starlink website last month found images of a prototype version of the antenna consumers will use to connect to the Internet network.
UFO on a stick aka Starlink user terminal looks beautiful pic.twitter.com/1aog0FS1jq
– Viv 🐉 (@flcnhvy) 14 July 2020
Musk responded to the tweet, writes the Starlink ground terminal “has engines to orient themselves for optimal viewing angle. No expert installer required. ”
SpaceX has not released any pricing information for the Starlink service.
SpaceX says it will soon begin “beta testing” with the Starlink network. The company collects email information and email addresses from potential customers, and SpaceX says it will provide updates on Starlink news and service availability to those who sign up.
The beta testing is expected to begin for users living at higher latitudes – such as the northern United States and southern Canada – where the partially complete Starlink satellite fleet can provide more consistent service. SpaceX will send a Starlink kit with a small antenna, router and other equipment to people selected for beta testing.
Astronomers have raised concerns about the brightness of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and other companies planning to launch large numbers of broadband satellites into a low-Earth orbit.
The Starlink satellites are brighter than expected, and can be seen in trains soon after each launch, before spreading and dimming as they travel higher above the Earth.
SpaceX introduced a dark coating on a Starlink satellite launched in January in a bid to reduce the amount of sunlight that the spacecraft reflects to Earth. That has provided some improvement, but not enough for ultra-sensitive observers such as the U.S. government-funded Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, which will collect sky-high images to study distant galaxies, stars and search for potentially dangerous asteroids near Earth. .
On June 3, SpaceX launched a satellite with a newly deployed radio-transparent sunshade to block sunlight to reach bright surfaces on the spacecraft, such as its antennas. SpaceX says that all Starlink satellites starting with spaceflight launched on Friday will carry the sunshades.
Combined with changes in how the satellites are oriented at lower altitudes shortly after launch, the Sunscreens could reduce the most serious impact on the astronomy of the Starlink network, eliminating the Starlink satellites from naked eye vision as they once had its 341-mile-high operational orbit.
The Vera Rubin Observatory’s 3,200-megapixel camera will begin astronomical surveys in 2022. Each image will cover an area of the sky the size of 40 full moons, and many of the images will include light streaks by satellites from the Starlink network, and potentially other satellite constellations.
The worst impact will come after dusk and before breakfast. This is a time of day when astronomers want to search for asteroids.
Astronomers in the Vera Rubin Observatory team say SpaceX has been working with them since last year to try to reduce the Starlink network’s impact on its scientific program. Astronomers illuminated a Vera Rubin image detector in a test to see how it would respond to the passage of a satellite as bright as a Starlink. They found that the satellite left not only one trace, but “ghost” traces away from the path of the spaceship.
Scientists from Vera Rubin Observatory said the ghost artifacts could be removed with software if the Starlink satellites are dimmer than 7th magnitude. Observations of the Starlink spacecraft with the dark coating indicate that the change dimmed the satellite to approximately 6.1 magnitude, which is a shame for Vera Rubin’s claim.
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