Tag: rocket

SpaceX Launches 40 More Internet Satellites

Spaceflight Now reports that a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket “lifted off from Cape Canaveral Monday night with 40 more internet satellites for OneWeb, nudging the network closer to full operational capability.” The Falcon 9 booster “returned to Cape Canaveral for landing eight minutes later.” SpaceX delayed “the launch of a different Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Monday night due to bad weather.” That mission was “supposed to launch just 35 minutes before the OneWeb mission from Cape Canaveral, but has now been rescheduled for liftoff Tuesday night.” The SpaceX launch team “working in a control center just outside the gate of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station began loading super-chilled, densified kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants into the Falcon 9 vehicle at T-minus 35 minutes.” Helium pressurant also “flowed into the rocket in the last half-hour of the countdown.” In the final “seven minutes before liftoff, the Falcon 9’s Merlin main engines were thermally conditioned for flight through a procedure known as ‘chilldown.’” The Falcon 9’s “guidance and range safety systems were also configured for launch.”
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)

 

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SpaceX launches the OneWeb Launch 16 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, Monday, January 9 at 11:50 p.m. ET.
(SpaceX; YouTube)

SpaceX Launches 54 New Starlink Satellites into Orbit

CBS News reported that SpaceX “launched its third Falcon 9 rocket in less than two days Saturday, sending 54 Starlink internet satellites into orbit using a recycled first-stage booster which was making its record 15th flight.” This was “also the California rocket builder’s 59th launch so far this year, nearly doubling its 2021 record.” The 54 Starlink satellites “were released in a batch, pushing the total number of Starlink satellites launched to date by SpaceX to 3,612, as SpaceX continues to populate its globe-spanning constellation of laser-linked broadband relay stations.” While “not all of the satellites are still operational or in orbit…space statistician Jonathan McDowell estimates 3,230 were operational going into Saturday’s flight.”
Full Story (CBS News)
 
 
 

 

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SpaceX launches 54 Starlink Satellites to low-Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A on Saturday, December 17, 2022, at 4:32 p.m. ET.
(SpaceX; YouTube)

SpaceX Rocket Launches with Rival Satellite Payload

Bloomberg reports that SpaceX “successfully launched 40 satellites for competing communications company OneWeb on Thursday.” It’s the first of three “planned missions the unlikely collaborators are set to perform over the coming months despite their separate efforts to build megaconstellations that will beam broadband Internet coverage to Earth.”
Full Story (Bloomberg)

 

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OneWeb 1 Mission, December 8, 2022
(SpaceX; YouTube)

Firefly Aerospace Launches its First Rocket into Orbit

Bloomberg reported Firefly Aerospace Inc. has “launched its first rocket into orbit, advancing the private space startup’s bid to become a reliable partner for NASA.” Firefly’s Alpha rocket “took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Saturday and successfully put three small payloads into Earth orbit, including one for the US space agency. A previous launch attempt failed in September 2021 when the debut Alpha rocket veered off course and had to be exploded shortly after takeoff.” Saturday’s launch “follows years of engineering work, litigation and financial struggles for Cedar Park, Texas-based Firefly, one of several companies NASA selected to deliver science payloads to the moon as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.”
Full Story (Bloomberg)

NASA SLS Rocket’s Flight Termination System May Further Delay Launch

The Washington Post reports on the Flight Termination System for NASA’s Space Launch System, a “detonation system designed to destroy the rocket in case it starts to veer wildly off course and threaten people on the ground.” The system, while “a vital and ubiquitous” safety component, is “creating a bit of a headache for NASA as it struggles to launch the SLS rocket for the first time.” Although the Space Force “requires the batteries on the SLS’s termination system to be recharged” regularly, this task can “only be done in the rocket’s assembly building,” further delaying “a launch that last week was waived off twice because of other technical problems, including a massive leak of the liquid hydrogen the rocket uses for fuel.” The Space Force had already extended its battery charging time window, and NASA is in discussions “for a waiver that would allow the time frame to be extended yet again,” although the waive would “have to extend the initial 20-day requirement to over some 40 days, since the earliest NASA could attempt a launch is a two-week period that begins Sept. 19.”
Full Story (Washington Post)

NASA’s Artemis Rocket Returns to Launchpad

The New York Times reports that “NASA’s big moon rocket is rolling out to the launching pad for the third time – and it actually is slated to launch to the moon.” The rollout “had been scheduled for Thursday, but NASA announced on Monday that the move had been moved up to Tuesday evening.” This is leading up “to the launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission, an uncrewed test of the giant rocket and the Orion spacecraft where astronauts will one day sit.”
Full Story (New York Times – Subscription publication)

CAPSTONE Launched Tuesday Morning

CNET News reports that NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched from the Rocket Lab launch facility in New Zealand on Tuesday, “paving the way for Artemis astronauts to return to the moon in the coming years.” CAPSTONE “will be testing new navigation systems and trying out the halo-shaped orbit around the moon that will one day be occupied by NASA’s Lunar Gateway. The Gateway will be a sort of small space station circling the moon that will be used for staging for Artemis missions to the lunar surface.”
Full Story (CNET News)
 
 
 

 

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Official NASA Broadcast of CAPTSTONE launch from New Zealand, June 28, 2022
(NASA via YouTube)

NASA Launches Rocket from Australia’s Northern Territory

SPACE reported that over the next weeks NASA “will launch three rockets from the Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory on the Dhupuma Plateau, near Nhulunbuy. The rockets are 13 meter ‘sounding’ rockets that will not reach orbit but will take scientific observations.” This is the first time NASA will launch rockets from a commercial site in a foreign territory. The launch will “represent a major step forward for commercial space operators, as well as signaling the opportunity for future joint projects between Australia and the United States.” The rockets “have been designed and built by NASA and will be used for scientific investigations into the physics of the sun, astrophysics and the type of planetary science we can only conduct in the southern hemisphere.”
Full Story (SPACE)
 
 
 

 

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NASA launches rocket from Australia’s Northern Territory, June 26, 2022
(9 News Australia via YouTube)

South Korea Launches First Homegrown Space Rocket

The AP reports that South Korea “successfully launched its first homegrown space rocket on Tuesday, officials said, a triumph that boosted the country’s growing space ambitions but also proved it has key technologies to build a space-based surveillance system and bigger missiles amid animosities with rival North Korea.” The Nuri rocket “succeeded in releasing and placing its functioning ‘performance verification’ satellite at an altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles) after its liftoff from South Korea’s space launch center at 4 p.m.”
Full Story (AP)
 
 
 

 

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Launch of South Korea’s Nuri rocket, June 21, 2022
(Korea Now via YouTube)

Angara 1.2 Rocket Makes First Operational Launch

Aviation Week reports that the Russian Aerospace Forces “conducted the first operational launch of a light Angara 1.2 rocket from Plesetsk spaceport in the northern part of the country on April 29. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the launch vehicle successfully orbited the Cosmos-2555 military satellite.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
 
 
 

 

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Russian Angara 1.2 carrier rocket Moved to LaunchPad