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+--- Thread: JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 (/thread-7946.html)
JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 - Yazata - Dec 14, 2019
A SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on Monday. It will be carrying a Japanese and Singaporean communications satellite (built by Boeing for two cooperating Asian telecommunications providers) eventually bound for geosynchronous orbit. It's a very heavy satellite, 6 tons, and firing it into geostationary orbit would have made recovery of the booster impossible. But it apparently isn't going to be launched into a Geostationary Transfer Orbit GTO. It will go into a lower orbit and then the payload will use its own propulsion system to raise itself into the desired orbit. So they will be trying to recover the booster. It won't have enough fuel left to return to Cape Canaveral but will try to land downrange on OCISLY.
The booster will be good old reliable veteran B 1056.2 with two flights already on its resume, both supply flights to the Space Station.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1205556646656692225
Launch time: Dec 16, 2019 7:10 PM EST, 4:10 PM PST (00:10 UTC on the 17th)
https://everydayastronaut.com/prelaunch-preview-falcon-9-block-5-jcsat-18-kacific-1/
SpaceX conducted a static test fire yesterday and B1056 successfully passed. (Third time, it already knows the drill.)
https://twitter.com/SpaceflightNow/status/1205553306040504321
Information on the payload on Gunter's extraordinary satellite website here
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/jcsat-18_kacific-1.htm
OCISLY left Port Canaveral under tow by tug Hawk Thursday, accompanied by support ship Go Quest. They will be trying to recover the fairings as well and both catcher's mitt ships, Ms Tree and Ms. Chief have put to sea. Recent positions as of today --
https://twitter.com/SpaceXFleet/status/1205965753717084166
SpaceX will have a stream, as will Tim Dodd
SpaceX's should be on their website
http://www.spacex.com
Tim's
https://www.youtube.com/everydayastronaut/live
According to Tim this will be the 77th flight of a Falcon 9, and if B 1056 makes it back alive, it will be the 47th recovery of a Falcon 9. (Many of the earliest ones weren't recovered.) This will be SpaceX's 13th Falcon 9 launch of 2019. (They are busy little bees, even if you don't count all the science-fiction-movie craziness in Boca.) The Crew-Dragon Inflight Abort should be coming on January 4 too.
And to inject a bit of diversity and intrigue, just to keep things exciting, Boeing should be flying its own Starliner unmanned test flight to the Space Station on this coming Friday, Dec 20th.
RE: JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 - C C - Dec 15, 2019
(Dec 14, 2019 11:29 PM)Yazata Wrote: ...According to Tim this will be the 77th flight of a Falcon 9, and if B 1056 makes it back alive, it will be the 47th recovery of a Falcon 9. (Many of the earliest ones weren't recovered.) This will be SpaceX's 13th Falcon 9 launch of 2019. (They are busy little bees, even if you don't count all the science-fiction-movie craziness in Boca.)...
Subjectively in terms of how time flies, all those numbers seem surprising. On rare occasions it feels like SpaceX didn't even exist until this decade -- that 2002 was 2012 instead, the former's still so vivid in some respects.
RE: JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 - Yazata - Dec 16, 2019
(Dec 15, 2019 05:12 PM)C C Wrote:(Dec 14, 2019 11:29 PM)Yazata Wrote: ...According to Tim this will be the 77th flight of a Falcon 9, and if B 1056 makes it back alive, it will be the 47th recovery of a Falcon 9. (Many of the earliest ones weren't recovered.) This will be SpaceX's 13th Falcon 9 launch of 2019. (They are busy little bees, even if you don't count all the science-fiction-movie craziness in Boca.)...
Subjectively in terms of how time flies, all those numbers seem surprising. On rare occasions it feels like SpaceX didn't even exist until this decade -- that 2002 was 2012 instead, the former's still so vivid in some respects.
I still vividly remember when they were still struggling to land a booster, when many of their early attempts failed. It doesn't seem like that long ago.
SpaceX is going to be doing something new this time, streaming Mission-Control audio without any additional commentary.
They warn that it might be silent for long periods. SpaceX controllers have a tendency to only talk when something is out of the ordinary, so as long as the flight progresses well, they won't say much. Some of the other commercial space companies' controllers talk a lot more. They will have all that stuff where controllers say things are performing nominally, but SpaceX just assumes that unless somebody says something isn't. They do have the traditional NASA-style pre-launch poll though, where they have all the various systems desks verify "Go flight!". (The Apollo and Space Shuttle movies love to portray that.)
The audio should be here:
https://youtu.be/Hca8Z89NpWQ
The normal hosted stream of the launch will be here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbXgZg9JmkI
Another (very good) stream will be from NSF. They will have more technical tidbits than the hosted SpaceX stream, which will be more about company and customer PR. But... SpaceX's stream will have video from onboard cameras and from OCISLY, that NSF probably won't have, unless they rebroadcast the SpaceX stream. What I do is watch the SpaceX video with the NSF sound playing on a different browser tab. (I might try that with the mission-control audio today too.) The NSF stream will be here:
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1206656642244337664
RE: JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 - Yazata - Dec 16, 2019
B1056 is vertical and ready to get fueled and go in about 3 1/2 hours. It's kind of sooty and smudgy, they obviously aren't repainting them.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1206646150276644865
(SpaceX photo)
Everyone asks what those four towers are. They are lightening rods. Thunderstorms cruise though this area regularly.
![[Image: EL7eRLnUYAAq5Ns?format=jpg&name=4096x4096]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EL7eRLnUYAAq5Ns?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)
RE: JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 Satellite Launch Monday Dec 16 - Yazata - Dec 17, 2019
B1056.3 launched as scheduled, put JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 into orbit, and then successfully landed once again for the third time, on OCISLY this time. Exactly in the center of of the SpaceX 'X'!
Launch:
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1206728397449125888
Stage separation:
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1206729188624883713
Landing:
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1206730725182984193
They just announced that the satellite has successfully deployed.
Boeing reports that transmissions from the satellite have been acquired.
https://twitter.com/BoeingSpace/status/1206773238539440131
If you think that this is just getting too perfect, they failed to catch the fairings.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1206741550694158338
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1206767825781587969