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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 06 2019, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-forget-to-wipe-your-nose dept.

SpaceX to Reuse Payload Fairing for First Time on Nov. 11 Launch:

A SpaceX launch set for Nov. 11 will mark the first Falcon 9 mission to use a payload fairing from a previous flight, the company announced Tuesday, shortly after SpaceX engineers at Cape Canaveral test-fired the mission's first stage booster, also refurbished and reused.

The Falcon 9 launch scheduled for next Monday — and previously planned for October — will loft 60 satellites for SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, joining 60 other test craft deployed on a Falcon 9 flight in May.

The launch window opens at 9:51 a.m. EST (1451 GMT) Monday and extends for approximately 11 minutes. It will be SpaceX's first launch since Aug. 6, and the first ground-based launch from Cape Canaveral since Aug. 22.

[...] Last month, a senior SpaceX official said the Starlink flight would be the company's first mission to fly a Falcon 9 first stage booster for a fourth launch.


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  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:11PM (2 children)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:11PM (#916920) Journal

    I haven't thought about it, but you are right about "The Lull". It's been a bit. We're far below last year's launch number.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:41PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 06 2019, @07:41PM (#916943) Journal

    SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 launch in months gets a launch date [teslarati.com]

    SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 launch in more than three months finally has a launch date and it looks like the company’s growing fleet is going to attempt to catch (or land) almost every piece of the rocket, a big first for Falcon 9 reusability if SpaceX can pull it off.

    After an exceedingly long wait, SpaceX’s next launch – Starlink’s first “v1.0” mission – is finally on the Eastern range and is scheduled to launch no earlier than ~10 am ET (15:00 UTC) on November 11th, recently confirmed by SpaceFlightNow.com and LaunchPhotography. Although similar lulls in US orbital launch activity have occurred in the past, they are extremely rare: the last time a lull more than three months long occurred was in 2010.

    For SpaceX, this is the longest the company has gone without a launch since Falcon 9’s last catastrophic failure, which grounded the rocket for ~4.5 months after a massive explosion in September 2016. By all appearances, the likely 14-week gap between orbital SpaceX launches [teslarati.com] is little more than the product of bad luck, with customer payloads and SpaceX payloads both coincidentally requiring more time than expected to prepare for flight.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:47AM (#917176)

    Is it just SpaceX experiencing a lull, or is that across the commercial launch market?