9 hours Ago By Martin Smith
This week will see a fourth flight of the Japanese H3 rocket carrying a communications satellite for the Japanese military and two launches from China. Blue Origin will attempt to test its second human-rated New Shepard capsule, which has been delayed twice since the start of the month. The week will start with a Starlink mission out of Cape Canaveral atop a SpaceX Falcon 9.
Later in the week, Falcon 9 will also fly a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. SpaceX has picked up its cadence following Falcon 9’s recent return-to-flight and is quickly approaching its 400th orbital mission. The company began the week at 398 total missions, following the launch of the OneWeb #20 mission from California.
If schedules hold, the company will reach its 400th orbital flight with the NROL-167 mission out of Vandenberg this week. Just as impressive, SpaceX launched Falcon 9 for the 100th time this year on the OneWeb mission, having already broken last year’s record of 98 launches. To put this into context, a quarter of all SpaceX launches in the company’s history will have taken place this year alone.
Falcon 9 launches the OneWeb #20 mission, SpaceX’s 100th launch of the year. (Credit: SpaceX) SpaceX launched five times in less than six days last week, with a launch from each of its four launch sites, including Starbase, and igniting 87 first-stage engines in the process. The milestone OneWeb mission was the company’s sixth successful launch in seven days.
LC-39A is currently being reconfigured for Falcon 9 flights, leaving Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) on the east coast and Vandenberg’s SLC-4E on the west coast to handle the Falcon 9 launch manifest. Chang Zheng 6 | Unknown Payload Marking China’s 50th launch of 2024, a Chang Zheng 6 (CZ-6) rocket will take flight from LC-16 at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the Shanxi Province of China on Monday, Oct 21, at 00:10 UTC. The payload for this mission is currently unknown.
This single-core launch vehicle burns liquid kerosene and oxygen and has been active since 2015. CZ-6 has launched 12 times to date, most recently with Geely’s Future Mobility Constellation Group 3. Chang Zheng 6 on pad LC-16 at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center.
(Credit: CASC) The CZ-6 family of rockets all launch from the inland Taiyuan launch site and now includes the taller CZ-6C rocket, which took its maiden, and so far only, flight this May. This is a booster-less variant of the newer medium-lift CZ-6A rocket, which was China’s first rocket to add solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-61 A Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch the Starlink 6-61 mission on Monday, Oct.
21, from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is expected at 10:40 PM EDT (02:40 UTC on Oct. 22) at the end of the available four-hour launch window.
Onboard will be a batch of 23 Starlink v2 Mini satellites, which are headed into an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the equator. The booster supporting this mission has not yet been confirmed but is expected to land on the autonomous droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which will be stationed downrange in the Atlantic. SpaceX’s Starlink service provides high-speed internet access across over 100 countries and has more than 4 million subscribers, most recently adding Samoa and the island nation of Vanuatu this month.
At the end of last week, SpaceX had launched 7,105 satellites, of which 6,150 have moved into their operational orbit. A stack of Starlink v2 Mini satellites before being enclosed in their fairing. (Credit: SpaceX) SpaceX recently filed a request to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking a modification to its current license regarding the second-generation Starlink satellites (v2).
The request includes lowering the satellites’ altitude by 45 km to as low as 475 km. The request also proposes that the satellites’ bandwidth be increased to gigabit-per-second speeds through more powerful antennas and that the satellites access additional spectrum in the E band. The heavier, full versions of the v2 satellites will require Starship to carry them to orbit and look to be renamed to v3 from the FCC request document.
Chang Zheng 2C | Unknown Payload Little is known about the payload onboard the next flight of a Chang Zheng 2C (CZ-2C) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China. Liftoff is anticipated from pad LC-3 on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 01:05 UTC during a short 17-minute launch window.
Standing 42 m tall with a 3.35 m wide fairing, the long-established CZ-2C has been active since 1982 and has 78 missions under its belt. Most recently, CZ-2C carried the Space Variable Objects Monitor, or SVOM, to low-Earth orbit in June — a French/Chinese X-ray telescope project to study gamma-ray bursts from the explosions of massive stars.
RSS Kármán Line and Booster 5 on the pad from the first attempt to launch NS-27 (Credit: Blue Origin) New Shepard | NS-27 Blue Origin will attempt to launch an uncrewed suborbital mission on Wednesday, Oct. 23, to verify its second human-rated New Shepard capsule, the RSS Kármán Line . Launching from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas, liftoff is scheduled for 7:00 AM CDT (15:00 UTC).
The initial launch attempt on Oct. 7 was scrubbed following an extended hold while the technical team attempted to troubleshoot an issue with the vehicle. The company also scrubbed an attempt on Oct.
13. The eight previous crewed launches have used Booster 4 and the RSS First Step capsule. The NS-27 mission will debut and verify that RSS Kármán Line and Booster 5 meet Blue Origin’s needs and perform as expected as the company’s launch manifest increases.
The vehicle features an updated livery and technology upgrades that improve its performance and reusability. The new capsule’s name refers to the boundary line that is widely regarded as the start of space. Among the new upgrades is an accommodation for carrying payloads on the booster — five of which will be carried on this flight — while another seven will be inside the crew capsule.
New navigation systems developed for the New Shepard and New Glenn vehicles are among these payloads, alongside two different Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors for the Lunar Permanence program. NS-27 is also carrying some ultra-wideband sensors as part of a NASA TechFlights grant and some reproductions of the black monoliths from the classic space movie 2001: A Space Odyssey for Spacemanic. As with other New Shepard flights, tens of thousands of student-designed postcards from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future program will also be onboard.
Aerial view of SLC-4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base with a Falcon 9 being prepared for flight. (Credit: SpaceX) Falcon 9 Block 5 | NROL-167 NROL-167 will see Falcon 9 carry a payload to low-Earth orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which is suspected to be the fourth batch of Starshield satellites launched for the agency as part of a $1.8 billion contract.
Liftoff is expected to occur on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 10:15 AM PDT (17:15 UTC) from SLC-4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The booster supporting this mission has not yet been confirmed but is expected to land downrange on the autonomous droneship Of Course I Still Love You .
As mentioned, if schedules hold, NROL-167 will serve as SpaceX’s 400th orbital launch of all time, Falcon 9’s 100th mission of 2024, and the 195th orbital launch attempt worldwide in 2024. Render of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 in its 22S configuration. (Credit: JAXA) H3-22S | Kirameki 3 A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 launcher, in its 22S configuration, is set to launch a geostationary communications satellite on Saturday, Oct.
6, at 06:44 UTC at the start of a launch window lasting nearly two hours. Operated by the DSN Corporation, DSN-3, also known as Kirameki 3, will operate in the X-band for the Japanese military. H3 is expected to fly from pad LA-Y2 at the Yoshinobu Launch Complex at the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.
This will be the third flight of this rocket this year, with all three flying in the 22S configuration. “22S” denotes two LE-9 engines on the main stage burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, two SRB-3 side boosters, and a short-length payload fairing. This same configuration is expected to fly once more before the end of the year carrying the Michibiki 5 navigation satellite.
A four-booster version with a longer fairing, the 24L configuration, will debut next September with the first HTV-X cargo transport vehicle to fly to the International Space Station (ISS). This is the next-generation version of the HTV, which carried cargo to the ISS nine times between 2009 and 2020. The 50th and final flight of H3’s predecessor, the H-IIA, will be the GOSAT-GW mission, which is also expected to fly before the end of the year.
Render of the HTV-X approaching the International Space Station (Credit: JAXA) There are also plans for H3 to launch the robotic Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) next year to the Moon’s south pole — a joint project developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). What’s more, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries signed an agreement this week for H3 to launch the MBR Explorer mission in 2028 for the United Arab Emirates. This probe will visit seven asteroids during its mission and will attempt to land on one.
(Lead image: A Falcon 9 sits on the pad at SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, the location from which SpaceX is expected to launch its 400th orbital mission. Credit: SpaceX).
