SpaceX aims to relaunch the Falcon 9 booster that catapulted astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station in May on Monday, this time carrying a South Korean military communications satellite while searching for a record response time. fast between flights of an orbital-class rocket stage.
In a tweet on Saturday, the California-based launch company confirmed plans to launch South Korea’s Anasis 2 military communications satellite on Monday from platform 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The mission was scheduled to launch on Tuesday, July 14, but SpaceX delayed launch to address an issue in the second stage of Falcon 9.
The launch window opens on Monday at 5 pm EDT (2100 GMT) and runs until 8:55 pm EDT (0055 GMT). The official launch weather forecast calls for isolated showers at Cape Canaveral on Monday night, but there is a 70 percent chance of acceptable conditions for the Falcon 9 rocket to take off during the nearly four-hour launch window.
If the Falcon 9 rocket can take off with the Anasis 2 satellite on Monday, or sometime later this month, SpaceX will break its own record for the shortest change between flights from the same Falcon 9 booster. The shortest span between Releases of the same Falcon 9 booster to date have been 62 days, which SpaceX accomplished with a mission on February 17.
NASA achieved a 54-day response time between two launches of the space shuttle Atlantis in late 1985, a record that never coincided during the 30-year shuttle program. The time between the landing of Atlantis and the next launch was 50 days.
Once the Anasis 2 mission is off the ground, SpaceX may eclipse its record for rocket response time again in the coming weeks.
Utilizing platform 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and platform 39A at nearby Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX has five missions on its launch schedule from the Florida Space Coast in the next month or so, starting with Anasis 2 launch on Monday.
SpaceX’s next satellite launch for its Starlink broadband network is expected to launch in late July, although SpaceX has not confirmed a firm launch date. That mission was supposed to launch in late June from platform 39A at Kennedy Space Center, but SpaceX suspended two launch attempts due to unspecified technical problems with the rocket.
Two BlackSky commercial Earth imaging microsatellites are taking a ride into space on the Falcon 9 rocket with 57 SpaceX Starlink platforms. An official with Spaceflight, the ride-sharing launch corridor that secured the trip for the BlackSky satellites on Falcon 9, said Wednesday that the mission was expected to take off by the end of July.
Argentina’s SAOCOM 1B radar observation satellite was previously scheduled to take off on July 25 on a Falcon 9 rocket, and another batch of Starlink satellites was expected to launch, flying in conjunction with three Earth observation satellites from the Planet, in late July.
Those launches are expected to be delayed as a result of schedule delays encountered by previous Anasis 2 and Starlink / BlackSky missions. Another Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 is also planned for late August from Cape Canaveral.
Times have not been announced for subsequent Starlink missions, but SpaceX is reserved to launch the next Crew Dragon spacecraft with astronauts to the International Space Station and a GPS navigation satellite as early as September.
SpaceX currently has five Falcon 9 thrusters in its inventory, and the company has flown two new early stages on its 11 missions so far this year. At least two more new first stages of the Falcon 9 are slated to enter service in the coming months, with the next launch of SpaceX astronauts and the upcoming launch of a U.S. military GPS navigation satellite, both currently not planned. before September.
A planned Falcon Heavy launch in late 2020 with a clandestine US military cargo will fly with three new Falcon rocket thrusters. SpaceX officials said in December that the company planned to build around 10 new Falcon first stages in 2020.
With its success in reusing Falcon 9’s booster stages, the company has increased production of Falcon 9’s second stages, which are new to each mission.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, previously said that he wants to launch, regain and relaunch Falcon 9 Booster twice in a 24-hour period. But Musk hasn’t recently echoed those comments, instead focusing on SpaceX’s largest next-generation Starship launch vehicle to take the next leap in reusable rocket technology.
The Falcon 9 reinforcement assigned to the Anasis 2 mission is designated B1058. Monday’s launch will mark SpaceX’s twelfth mission of the year, and the second to use the B1058 vehicle.
During its launch with astronauts on May 30, the 156-foot-tall first stage separated from the upper stage of the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon spacecraft about two and a half minutes after takeoff. As the Crew Dragon accelerated into orbit, the propeller fired engines in a series of maneuvers to land vertically on SpaceX’s unmanned spacecraft parked in the Atlantic Ocean less than 10 minutes from the mission.
The drone returned to the Florida space coast with the thruster on its deck on June 2, and SpaceX took the rocket to a renovation facility in Cape Canaveral for inspections and preparations for its next mission.
SpaceX plans to recover the booster again after Monday’s launch.
The company’s “Just Read The Instructions” drone is in position about 400 miles (645 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral, and two ships have been dispatched to the Atlantic Ocean to retrieve the two-piece payload fairing from the Falcon 9.
The Anasis 2 spacecraft awaiting launch on Monday was manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space in Toulouse, France, and transported to Cape Canaveral last month in an Antonov An-124 cargo plane. Based on the design of Airbus’ Eurostar E3000 satellite, Anasis 2 “will provide secure communications over a wide coverage,” Airbus said in a statement.
The spacecraft will launch into an egg-shaped elliptical transfer orbit that stretches tens of thousands of miles above Earth. The propulsion system on board the satellite will circularize its orbit at an altitude of more than 22,000 miles (almost 36,000 kilometers) above the equator to reach a geostationary position, where Anasis 2 will remain on a fixed geographic location, circling the planet. qualify as the rotation of the Earth.
South Korea purchased the satellite, formerly known as KMilSatCom 1, through an agreement to offset South Korea’s purchase of F-35A fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin eventually outsourced the satellite manufacturing agreement to Airbus.
Before Anasis 2, the South Korean military relied on international and civilian-owned satellites for communications.
More details about the Anasis 2 satellite are secretly shrouded in the wishes of the spacecraft’s owner, the South Korean government.
Citing a request from its client, SpaceX said Saturday that its launch webcast for the Anasis 2 launch will end after the landing of the Falcon 9 first-stage booster, which is expected about eight and a half minutes after takeoff. At that time, Anasis 2 and the upper stage of the Falcon 9 should be in a low-altitude parking orbit, until the second stage Merlin engine is restarted at T + plus 26 minutes, 32 seconds.
After a 56-second burn in the second stage to send Anasis 2 into a higher orbit, the spacecraft will separate from the Falcon 9 rocket at T + plus 32 minutes, 29 seconds.
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