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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

SpaceX Seeks to tie its Record for Most Launches in a Year on Thursday [arstechnica.com]:

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 [arstechnica.com]. 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 [af.mil], 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 [arstechnica.com]. 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 [spaceflight.com]. That flight is slated to deliver 64 spacecraft from 34 organizations into Sun-Synchronous Low Earth Orbit.

Live stream on YouTube [youtube.com] should start about 15 minutes before launch.

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