![]() ![]() ![]() It was the 46th launch by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket family this year, an average cadence of one flight around every four days. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, itself standing about 15 stories tall, settled onto the deck of the drone ship less than nine minutes after launch, using thrust from its center engine to slow for touchdown. SpaceX plans to haul thousands more Starlink satellites into orbit in the coming years to add to the network's capacity, which now has more than 1.5 million subscribers. The company’s global Internet network now has about 4,400 satellites in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks spaceflight activity. SpaceX declared the launch a success following the deployment of the Starlink payloads about an hour after liftoff. The rocket’s nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines fired for about two and a half minutes to climb to the edge of space, then the booster detached to descend toward a landing on one of SpaceX’s landing platforms floating northeast of the Bahamas.Īn upper-stage engine ignited to continue propelling the Starlink satellites into orbit. The record-setting rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:58 pm EDT (03:58 UTC) with 22 second-generation Starlink satellites. Sunday night’s mission got the booster’s extended life off to a good start. The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December. ![]() SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal. The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. In that Friday tweet, Musk said that SpaceX should be ready to try another Starship launch in "1 to 2 months." We should know soon enough if the new steel plate will provide adequate protection to the orbital launch mount going forward. The engines were only at half thrust for the static fire test," he wrote. "Still early in analysis, but the force of the engines when they throttled up may have shattered the concrete, rather than simply eroding it. SpaceX's 1st orbital Starship looks supercool in these fueling test photosīut the February static fire didn't deliver the full power of an actual Starship launch, Musk noted in a tweet on Saturday (April 22). Elon Musk says SpaceX could launch a Starship to the moon 'probably sooner' than 2024: report Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing transportation system "Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter back in October 2020. SpaceX considered digging a flame trench at Starbase, which is located next to Boca Chica Beach, but ultimately decided not to. (Several Raptors did not fire as planned on Thursday, so thrust levels on the debut flight were lower than that max level.) But Starship's brawn is on another level its first-stage Raptors produce about 16.5 million pounds of thrust when firing at full capacity. Hardware at the pad suffered some damage but mostly stood up to the 8.8 million pounds of thrust generated by the SLS at liftoff.Īrtemis 1 made SLS the most powerful rocket ever to fly successfully. SLS flew for the first time last November, launching from Pad 39B to kick off NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission. For example, NASA recently built a new one at Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39B, so the site could support liftoffs of the agency's massive Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket. Starbase's orbital launch mount does not have a flame trench, a structure designed to deflect plume exhaust away from the pad during liftoff.įlame trenches are common features of pads that host launches of powerful rockets. ![]()
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