SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, perched on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, takes off from launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, taking NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station.
SpaceX
On Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt its third launch from its Historic NASA Astronaut Flight to the International Space Station May 30, while also targeting a Falcon 9 first.
The mission planned to raise a new American space force The GPS satellite orbiting a Falcon 9 rocket will be the company’s eleventh launch in 2020. Continuing this near-weekly launch rate would allow Elon Musk’s commercial space startup to easily set a company record for most launches. in one year.
It will also be the first time that SpaceX has attempted to land and retrieve its Falcon 9 rocket after the launch of a military satellite. The company launched another military GPS satellite in 2018, and at that time the US Air Force determined that SpaceX would be unable to perform the necessary flight path and would not land the first-stage booster, either, according to SpaceNews.
Since then, the company and the U.S. Army have negotiated changes to its GPS mission requirements and the cost of launch to allow SpaceX to attempt to land its first stage after raising the satellite on Tuesday.
The launch window from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida opens at 12:55 pm PT (3:55 Florida time). The weather is 60% favorable for a launch on June 30, according to SpaceX.
More to come soon
SpaceX had also scheduled its second Starlink carpool mission for last week, but the launch was finally postponed, and a new date for that takeoff has yet to be announced.
“The team needed additional time for pre-launch payments, but Falcon 9 and the satellites are healthy,” SpaceX tweeted a couple of hours before the scheduled launch time on Friday.
Already postponed from Tuesday to Thursday, it will be the third in a series of Starlink missions from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Withdrawing from today’s Starlink mission; The team needed additional time for pre-launch payments, but Falcon 9 and the satellites are in good shape. Will announce new target launch date once confirmed in range
– SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 26, 2020
The last series of missions began with his Historic success that sends NASA astronauts into orbit on May 30, followed by two Starlink It launches in June.
SpaceX had its busiest year so far in 2018 with 21 launches and is now on track to eclipse that mark in 2020, perhaps reaching 38 launches for the full year if all of its plans work. The company expects to continue packing its schedule with more takeoffs, with the goal of 70 missions in 2023, according to a draft submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this year.
Many of the launches will be Starlink missions, as SpaceX seeks to put tens of thousands of its small satellites into orbit this decade. The company has started Carrying out shared travel launches, making room for some commercial loads along with a batch of Starlink birds.
Starlink’s next launch will be Starlink’s second ride, this time with two Earth observation microsatellites for Black Sky, a company that provides high-definition satellite imagery.
This would have been Starlink’s third launch in June alone, bringing the size of the growing constellation to nearly 600 satellites and closer to the threshold of 800 flying routers than Musk has said he would allow a limited broadband service to start..
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