SpaceX has a lot on its plate in the next few days on the Eastern Range.
First up, there's the Crew Dragon Inflight-Abort, still on track for Saturday Jan 18 at famous Pad 39A. (Where the Apollo Moon flights and the Space Shuttles launched.)
Then two days later, they plan to launch another batch of Starlinks from Pad 40 on Monday January 20 at 12:20 PM EST.
Nextspaceflight.com is saying that the booster for the Starlinks will be B1059.3. Presumably they will try to recover it.
Lots of ifs... Will the IFA go well? Can they turn around their crews and the pads that quick (2 days)? ...Can they get a static test fire in or will they forego it?
The Starlinks could slip but Elon wants them to streamline their launch cadence and everyone seems to think that it's doable, if tight. The Starlinks might slip though.
The Starlink L3 launch scheduled for Jan 20 had been pushed back to Jan 21. I'm assuming to get more time between it and the In-flight Abort Test (which had been pushed back a day itself). So they conducted a Falcon 9 static fire today (Jan 20) in preparation.
But... once again, weather isn't exactly cooperating. They need satisfactory conditions to recover the booster and high winds and rough seas exceed specifications.
SpaceX is saying this: "Static fire of Falcon 9 complete ahead of launching 60 Starlink satellites. Due to extreme weather in the recovery area, team is evaluating best launch opportunity".
So it looks like tomorrow's launch is off. Wednesday seems to have bad weather in its forecast too. But starting Thursday, forecasts are for weather to improve quite a bit.
SpaceX on twitter says the new launch time is Wednesday 9:06 AM EST, 14:06 UTC, 6:06 AM PST). Maybe they haven't updated the date and time on the stream.
I believe that the booster will be B1051 on its third flight. It was last seen on the west coast at Vandenberg, launching those Canadian Radarsats. SpaceX hopes to recover it.
They were going to launch it today, but had to scrub due to 135 knot high altitude winds. Tomorrow was their backup day, but maybe they don't expect the high-altitude winds to subside that quickly.
And b1051 is safely back after its adventure! (Maybe... it appeared to have landed hard. Sitting very squat. Wonder if engines are damaged. Can the Octagrabber slither under it?)
YazataFeb 16, 2020 07:20 AM (This post was last modified: Feb 16, 2020 08:42 AM by Yazata.)
If you can't get enough Starlinks (Elon can't), more are scheduled to go up Monday (maybe). They were supposed to go tomorrow, but it was scrubbed well in advance because of a bad valve. Launch time around 10AM EST (if it goes, dunno how much disassembly will be required to get at the suspect valve.)
Core appears to be b1056, last seen launching a Japanese/Singaporean communications satellite on December 16, after two supply trips to the Space Station in May and July. This will be its 4th flight.
Livestreams will be in the usual places. Most notably...
(Feb 2, 2020 03:22 PM)confused2 Wrote: These fairings just drop and they catch (one of) them?
They try to catch both. They are worth several million $ each and every bit helps in Elon's quest for cheap spaceflight.
And yeah, they just fall. They get high enough to be in space, but they aren't going fast enough to go into orbit. Suborbital. They are relatively light and have a big surface area, so air resistance decelerates them pretty effectively.
Their convex side is oriented into the wind and I assume there is some attitude control thing to ensure that. Or maybe it's entirely aerodynamic. It gets very hot. Check out the SpaceX video shot on a falling fairing half in the tweet below. It shows fairing separation, then some time cut out, then all kinds of hot glowing plasma as it reenters the atmosphere at hypersonic velocity, then more time cut out, then parachute deploy.
Initial guesses are that b1056 might have suffered a control system hydraulic failure, perhaps involving its grid fins. It was nevertheless able to execute a soft landing in the sea close to OCISLY and may be recoverable. No video of it landing (yet) but it sounds like a problem very similar to the rocket that went into a spin some months ago.
This photo (a screenshot from the SpaceX live feed) has emerged, showing something coming off b1056. Speculation is that it might be hydraulic fluid that leaked and then froze.
Edit: Some of the engineers say that they've seen that before and it's probably nothing. There's a LOX pressure relief valve up by the grid fins and water vapor in the ambient atmosphere at the launch pad tends to freeze (due to the cold LOX vapor coming out of the valve outlet) prior to launch. So a ring of water ice builds up at that point. It can come off in flight. Sometimes all at once in complete rings of ice, sometimes partially like in the photo above. Does no harm and doesn't indicate a problem.
Edit: Talk is that neither of the fairing halves were caught.
So kind of a mixed result. The primary mission of lofting the Starlinks succeeded. The secondary stuff, landing the booster and catching the fairings, didn't.
OK, it's time to tear yourself away from Coronavirus anxiety and admit that just like toilet paper, there can never be enough Starlinks.
60 more are scheduled to go up tomorrow morning. (9:22 AM EDT, 13:22 UTC, 6:22 AM PDT)
The booster is tried and true B1048, going for a new record: 5 launches and recoveries. The Block 5 Falcons are designed for 10 flights without a major overhaul, so if B1048 succeeds tomorrow they will be halfway there.
There will be other streams too. SpaceX has the best visuals, since they have the on-board cameras. The other streams usually rebroadcast the SpaceX feed, with their own unique commentary.
Here's where the Tim Dodd (Everydayastronaut) stream should be found
YazataMar 15, 2020 02:51 PM (This post was last modified: Mar 15, 2020 08:36 PM by Yazata.)
Launch resulted in a pad-abort. The countdown went normally down to t = 0, a puff of vapor came out from the bottom of the Falcon, but that was all. What happens is that when the engines start, the on-board computer watches all nine engines millisecond by millisecond, and apparently something about how a turbopump or something was behaving didn't please the computer. The rocket remains clamped down for a fraction of a second as the engines spool up, so the computer never released the clamps and instead stopped the launch process at literally the last moment. Since SpaceX's human engineers have to go through all the data and figure out what displeased the computer, and since the Starlinks only have a ten minute launch window to put them in the right orbit, launch is scrubbed for today.
It's interesting that B1048 successfully passed its static fire test on Friday. All engines lit up properly then. A wit on one of the live streams said 'the coronavirus regulator probably overloaded'.
Jan 15, 2020 06:09 AM
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