The launch of the rocket from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission will launch SpaceX’s second set of 53 Starlink broadband satellites.
We’re canceling today’s launch opportunity owing to an adverse local weather prediction, as well as lousy recovery weather, with a much better possibility tomorrow, stated SpaceX’s launch director on the Falcon 9 countdown net. SCRUB. SpaceX has canceled today’s launch owing to severe weather at Cape Canaveral and adverse circumstances in the rocket recovery zone. At 7:19 a.m. EST, SpaceX will try again to launch the Falcon 9 rocket on the Starlink 4-1 mission.
In a few minutes, SpaceX’s launch conductor will poll the Falcon 9 launch crew for permission to begin fuelling the 229-foot-tall rocket at pad 40. The rocket’s first stage booster will split around two and a half minutes into the mission as it heads northeast from Cape Canaveral, landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” roughly 400 miles northeast of the launch site in mind. The booster is slated to land on the floating platform at T+plus 8 minutes, 42 seconds, just before the upper stage engine of the Falcon 9 is turned down to finish the injection of the 53 Starlink satellites into orbit today’s flight.
According to a mission timetable given by SpaceX, the upper stage will deploy 53 flat-panel Starlink satellites at T+plus 15 minutes, 31 seconds. The satellites will be launched into an extended orbit with an inclination of 53.2 degrees to the equator, ranging from 131 miles to 210 miles in height.
The quarter-ton satellites, built-in Redmond, Washington, are expected to deploy power-generating solar arrays and prime their krypton ion thrusters to raise their orbits to an operational altitude of 335 miles, where they will begin populating a new orbital shell in SpaceX’s Starlink network.
With today’s launch, SpaceX will have sent 1,844 Starlink satellites into orbit since May 2019. However, some have de-orbited and are no longer moving, implying they were deactivated or failed after launch. The Falcon 9 will be fueled with super-chilled, densified RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, the following critical stage in the countdown.
At 7:03 a.m. EST, SpaceX’s launch conductor will confirm that all launch team members are prepared to begin the final 35-minute automated countdown sequence, followed by the start of filling the rocket with super-chilled, densified RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants at 7:06 a.m. EST.
At T-minus 16 minutes or 7:25 a.m. EST, liquid oxygen loading into the second stage will begin, followed by a final chill down of the rocket’s nine Merlin first-stage engines, a last pre-flight engine steering check, switching to internal power, and pressurization of the Falcon 9’s propellant tanks leading up to liftoff.
It’s 45 minutes before the end of the world. The 53 satellites placed atop the rocket will be the first in SpaceX’s Starlink constellation to inhabit a new orbital shell.
According to predicted orbit data given by SpaceX with satellite trackers and space traffic management, the mission will try to launch the 53 satellites into an orbit and a perigee, or low energy, of 131 miles. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will launch from Cape Canaveral and lose its first stage booster into the flight. The first stage, dubbed B1058 in SpaceX’s inventory of reusable rockets, has completed eight previous flights, beginning with the awaited launch of SpaceX’s first crew test flight for NASA in May 2020.