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SpaceX Seeks to tie its Record for Most Launches in a Year on Thursday:
This year the company has had a lot on its plate. It flew the large Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in February. It introduced a brand-new, potentially highly reusable variant of the Falcon 9 rocket in May. And all throughout the year, the company's engineers have been scrambling to finalize development of the Dragon spacecraft to meet NASA's needs to get its astronauts to the International Space Station.
Even so, the company has maintained a steady launch cadence, and on Thursday the company will attempt its 18th mission of this year from Launch Complex-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Thursday launch window for the Es’hail-2 satellite mission opens at 3:46pm ET (20:46 UTC) and lasts until 5:29pm ET (22:29 UTC). Weather conditions are 60 percent favorable, and a back-up launch window exists for Friday afternoon.
The Es’hail-2 satellite will provide telecommunications services for the Middle East and North Africa regions as well as providing the first amateur radio geostationary communication capability. The three-ton satellite will be delivered to a geostationary transfer orbit.
[...] The first stage of this Falcon 9 rocket, a Block 5 variant of the booster, first flew on July 22 to launch the Telstar 19V mission. The company will attempt to land the first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone ship that will be located offshore, in the Atlantic Ocean. This landing will come about eight minutes after liftoff, and the satellite is scheduled to be deployed into its transfer orbit a little more than 32 minutes into the flight.
Up to 4 more flights are planned for this year; the next — possibly as soon as Monday — would be Spaceflight Industries' SSO-A flight-sharing mission. That flight is slated to deliver 64 spacecraft from 34 organizations into Sun-Synchronous Low Earth Orbit.
Live stream on YouTube should start about 15 minutes before launch.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 16 2018, @09:08AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches#Future_2018_launches [wikipedia.org]
Like I said, the SSO-A launch on Monday should be a lot more interesting.
I don't know what the payload deployment from the custom adapter will exactly look like, but I imagine we aren't going to see all ~70 satellites ejected at once. So it could be a really long stream. I guess it will get boring sometime after the 20th satellite spewed.
Alternatively, the complexity involved could lead to a failure and some resulting excitement. Although I doubt anything will explode.
Speaking of routine, that launch should mark the first time a Falcon 9 booster has been reused for a third time.
In January next year, we'll probably see the first lunar payload to be launched by a Falcon 9, although the payload will do the work of getting it into the right orbit and deploying a lunar lander. There will also be an Arabsat payload launched by a Falcon Heavy, tentatively in January.
In mid-2019, there's the Crew Dragon in-flight abort test, and the actual mission to send astronauts to the ISS. And hopefully we will see testing of a "mini-BFS" and Grasshopper-style tests of the full BFS in 2019.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]