Meanwhile, high above, the single vacuum Merlin engine of the second stage will fire for about six-minutes to reach a parking orbit. SpaceX said it was the 13th flight for this fairing-half. The SpaceX support vessel ‘Bob’ recovers a Falcon 9 fairing-half from the Atlantic Ocean after the Starlink 6-26 mission on Nov. SpaceX recently released a photograph of a payload fairing half, which had made 13 flights, being recovered from the Ocean following the last Starlink launch. The rocket’s payload fairing halves will splashdown on parachutes a little further downrange from the drone ship and be scooped up by the support ship ‘Bob’, named after Crew Dragon Demo-2 astronaut Bob Behnken. After burning its nine Merlin 1D engines for nearly two and a half minutes, the first stage will separate from the second stage and continue downrange to land on the drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’ in the Atlantic Ocean, about 424 miles (682 km) from the launch site. It also helped deliver supplies to the International Space Station on the CRS-27 Cargo Dragon flight.Īfter lifting off from Florida’s Space Coast, the Falcon 9 will head south-easterly targeting an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the Equator. In addition to making five more Starlink deliveries, it launched the SES-22 satellite, ispace’s HAKUTO-R lunar lander and the Hispasat Amazonas Nexus satellite. It entered service in May 2022 carrying a batch of 53 V1.5 Starlink satellites. The Falcon 9 booster for Tuesday’s Starlink 6-27 mission, tail number B1073, is making its 11th flight. File photo of SpaceX’s Starlink V2 Mini satellites inside a payload processing facility at Cape Canaveral earlier this year. It will carry a multitude of small satellites on a ride-share mission. On the other side of the country at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, another Falcon 9 was being prepared for a Thursday launch of the Transporter 9 mission but it has now slipped two days to Nov. It was the first launch from Space Launch Complex 40 since SpaceX attached a crew access arm to a recently-constructed tower as it upgrades the facility to handle crew and cargo Dragon flights.Īs the Starlink mission got ready to fly, at NASA’s neighboring Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX prepared to roll out another Falcon 9 with a Cargo Dragon for a space station resupply mission, scheduled for liftoff on Thursday at 8:28 p.m. Space Force meteorologists at the 45th Weather squadron said Monday there was a greater than 95-percent chance of acceptable weather for launch. Near-perfect weather was forecast for the launch of 23 more satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service. Liftoff from pad 40 occurred at 12:05 a.m. SpaceX sent up 23 Starlink satellites during a mission from Cape Canaveral just on the other side of midnight, the first of two planned Falcon 9 launches in less than 48 hours.
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