Between Sunday evening and Monday evening, SpaceX groups in Texas, Florida, and California supervised three Falcon 9 rocket launches and accomplished a full gown rehearsal forward of the subsequent flight of the corporate’s large Starship launch car.
This was a exceptional sequence of occasions, even for SpaceX, which has launched a mission at a median price of as soon as each three days because the begin of the 12 months. We have reported on this earlier than, nevertheless it’s price reinforcing that no launch supplier, industrial or authorities, has ever operated at this cadence.
SpaceX has beforehand had rockets on all 4 of its lively launch pads. However what SpaceX completed over a 24-hour interval was noteworthy. Engineers inside a minimum of 4 management facilities had been actively overseeing spacecraft and rocket operations concurrently.
The sprawl of SpaceX
On Sunday evening on the Starbase facility in South Texas, groups loaded greater than 10 million kilos of methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the practically 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket slated to raise off as quickly as this month on the third full-scale check flight of SpaceX’s next-generation launcher.
This was doubtless the ultimate main check earlier than SpaceX launches the third Starship check flight. The countdown rehearsal of the totally stacked rocket ended as deliberate at T-minus 10 seconds, simply earlier than the booster’s Raptor engines had been ignited; SpaceX then drained the car of propellant. SpaceX beforehand test-fired the Tremendous Heavy booster and Starship higher stage individually.
The schedule for the subsequent Starship launch hinges on approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is reviewing SpaceX’s actions to right the malfunctions that occurred on the second Starship check flight in November. Final week, the FAA introduced it closed its investigation into the second Starship check flight, which was largely profitable in demonstrating important progress on SpaceX’s privately funded rocket program. However the check flight ended with explosions of the Tremendous Heavy booster and Starship higher stage, prompting an FAA investigation.
On the subsequent Starship flight, SpaceX desires to carry out some early-stage testing of the in-space refueling know-how it can want for later Starship flights, similar to missions to the Moon for NASA.
On the identical time SpaceX’s group in Texas managed the Starship countdown rehearsal, one other group of engineers and technicians on Florida’s Area Coast stepped by a Falcon 9 launch countdown Sunday evening. Three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut strapped into their seats on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on prime of the Falcon 9 rocket, then waited for liftoff from Launch Complicated 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart at 10:53 pm EST Sunday (03:53 UTC Monday).
The Falcon 9 launch of NASA’s Crew-8 mission Sunday evening was the primary of three Falcon 9 launches over the subsequent 20 hours. Subsequent in line was a launch at 5:05 pm EST (2205 UTC) Monday from Vandenberg Area Pressure Base in California with 53 small payloads on SpaceX’s tenth Transporter rideshare mission. The client payloads on this Falcon 9 launch included MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite tv for pc funded primarily by philanthropic donations to watch methane greenhouse gasoline missions around the globe.
Then, lower than two hours later, at 6:56 pm EST (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX’s most lively launch pad at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station in Florida. This mission delivered 23 extra Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX’s industrial Web community. At 1 hour and 51 minutes, this was the shortest time separation up to now between two SpaceX launches.
All three Falcon 9 launches ended with landings of the rockets’ first stage boosters.
Whereas controllers at Starbase, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg sorted these three Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX engineers on the firm’s headquarters close to Los Angeles tracked the efficiency and progress of the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on its option to the Worldwide Area Station, the place it docked early Tuesday. Subsequent week, one other SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon Endurance, will depart the station to carry a special four-person crew again to Earth.
SpaceX, which now has greater than 13,000 workers, pulled off an identical rapid-fire launch cadence in mid-February with three Falcon 9 launches in roughly 23 hours, however this time included the extra complexity of working a Dragon crew capsule en path to the ISS, plus the Starship countdown in Texas. Whereas all this was occurring, a handful of floor controllers additionally monitored the well being of the Dragon spacecraft presently docked on the house station.
