From Sunday night into Monday night, SpaceX teams in Texas, Florida and California oversaw three Falcon 9 rocket launches, completing a full dress rehearsal ahead of the next flight of the company’s giant Starship launch vehicle. did.
It was a surprising series of events even for SpaceX, which has been launching missions at an average rate of once every three days since the beginning of the year. We’ve reported on this before, but it’s worth emphasizing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has operated at this pace before.
SpaceX previously had rockets on all four of its active launch pads. But what SpaceX accomplished in her 24 hours is remarkable. Engineers in at least four control centers were actively monitoring spacecraft and rocket operations simultaneously.
SpaceX sprawl
On Sunday night at the Starbase facility in south Texas, the team loaded more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellant onto the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket, which is expected to launch as soon as this month. was. The third full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle.
This was likely the last major test before SpaceX launches its third Starship test flight. The countdown rehearsal for the fully stacked rocket ended on schedule at T-minus 10 seconds, just before the booster’s Raptor engine was ignited. SpaceX then drained the propellant from the vehicle. SpaceX previously test-fired its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage separately.
The schedule for the next Starship launch is subject to approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is reviewing SpaceX’s actions to fix a glitch that occurred during the second Starship test flight in November. Last week, the FAA announced it had concluded its investigation into the second Starship test flight, which nearly succeeded in demonstrating significant advances in SpaceX’s privately funded rocket program. However, the test flight ended with the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage exploding, prompting an FAA investigation.
With the next Starship flight, SpaceX hopes to conduct early tests of in-space refueling technology that will be needed for later Starship flights, such as NASA’s mission to the moon.
At the same time that a SpaceX team in Texas managed Starship’s countdown rehearsal, another group of engineers and technicians on Florida’s Space Coast conducted the Falcon 9 launch countdown Sunday night. Three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are strapped into seats on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. effort The spacecraft was placed atop a Falcon 9 rocket and awaited liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy Space Center at 10:53 pm ET Sunday (03:53 pm UTC Monday).
Sunday night’s Falcon 9 launch on NASA’s Crew 8 mission was the first of three Falcon 9 launches over the next 20 hours. Next up was SpaceX’s 10th Transporter rideshare mission, which took place Monday at 5:05 p.m. ET (2205 UTC) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying 53 small It was launched with a payload. The customer’s payload on this Falcon 9 launch included his $88 million satellite MethaneSAT, funded primarily by philanthropic donations, to monitor methane greenhouse gas missions around the world. Ta.
And less than two hours later, at 6:56 p.m. ET (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX’s most active launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. did. The mission launched 23 more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX’s commercial internet network. At one hour and 51 minutes, it was the shortest time ever between two SpaceX launches.
All three Falcon 9 launches ended with the landing of the rocket’s first stage booster.
While controllers at Starbase, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg managed these three Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX engineers at its headquarters near Los Angeles tracked Crew Dragon’s performance and progress. Ta. effort The spacecraft was on its way to the International Space Station and docked early Tuesday morning.Next week, another SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon endurance, Depart the station and bring another four crew members back to Earth.
SpaceX, which currently employs more than 13,000 people, successfully launched a Falcon 9 three times in about 23 hours, completing a similar rapid-fire launch in mid-February. This included the added complexity of operating a Dragon crew capsule en route. ISS and Starship countdown in Texas. While all this was happening, a small number of ground controllers were also monitoring the status of the Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the space station.
