SpaceX’s last launch of the primary half of 2023 is ready for this Friday, June 23, carrying 56 Starlink v1.5 satellites. Liftoff is scheduled to occur at 9:57 AM EDT (13:57 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A backup launch attempt is offered on the identical day 98 minutes later.
The mission, Starlink Group 5-12, marks the forty fourth mission of the 12 months for the corporate and wraps up a record-breaking first half of the 12 months. Over 50 missions are on tap for the second half of the 12 months that, if achieved, would put the corporate near its goal of 100 launches in 2023.
If launched on time, the mission can even break the record turnaround time for launches from SLC-40 — a record that SpaceX has broken several times within the last 12 months.
Following the standard 35-minute long propellant load sequence, Falcon 9 will ignite its nine Merlin 1D engines on the primary stage for a two-and-a-half-minute ascent. This might be followed by their shutdown and the primary and second stages will separate.
The primary stage for this mission, B1069, is flying for an eighth time and can attempt a landing on SpaceX’s drone ship which is situated 639 kilometers downrange. If successful, this might be the fifty fifth successful landing on this drone ship and the 129th consecutive landing of a Falcon booster for the reason that last landing failure.
After stage separation, the only Merlin 1D Vacuum (MVacD) engine on the second stage will ignite and burn for roughly six minutes to insert the satellites right into a preliminary low-Earth parking orbit.
About 20 seconds into the MVacD’s first burn, the fairing halves will separate and these will initiate their return back to Earth for recovery. The fairing halves for this mission might be recovered by SpaceX’s multi-purpose recovery vessel . With SpaceX achieving its long-time goal, this mission will feature a fairing half flying for its tenth time — a primary.
Once in its initial parking orbit, the second stage will coast for about 45 minutes to achieve the orbit’s highest point or apogee. At apogee, the MVacD engine will briefly ignite for a second time to lift the altitude of the bottom point of the orbit or perigee.
After that, the second stage will initiate an end-over-end rotation to create the inertia needed to deploy the Starlink satellites riding on top of its payload adapter.
The satellites might be deployed right into a 298-by-340-kilometer orbit at a 43-degree orbital inclination. After that, they’ll use their krypton-fueled Hall Effect thrusters to lift their orbit, first to a 350-kilometer high orbit for checkouts after which into their operational 530-kilometer high orbit.
This mission carries 56 Starlink v1.5 satellites, bringing the full of Starlink satellites launched to 4,698. Of those, 4,368 satellites remain in orbit with the remainder having reentered already. 90 are in orbit but either non-responsive or actively deorbiting, 590 are in orbit and moving to operational orbit, and three,688 satellites are of their operational orbit.
Starlink Gen 1 | Starlink Gen 2 | |||||
Missions | V1.0 | Group 2 | Group 3 | Group 4 | Group 5 | Group 6 |
Orbit | 550 km at 53º | 570 km at 70º | 560 km at 97.6º | 540 km at 53.2º | 530 km at 43º | |
Satellites launched | 1665 | 408 | 243 | 1637 | 541 | 86 |
Satellites reentered | 178 | 3 | 10 | 68 | 2 | 7 |
Satellites in operational orbit | 1423 | 152 | 233 | 1544 | 306 | 30 |
(Status of Starlink constellation from Jonathan McDowell data from June 22 before launch)
These might be among the many last Starlink v1.5 satellites that SpaceX intends to launch. Only two more missions with these satellites remain on the corporate’s schedule, each set for early July.
All Starlink missions for the foreseeable future will feature Starlink v2 Mini satellites, at the very least until SpaceX’s Starship rocket is able to launch the full-size Starlink v2 satellites and other future variants which might be planned.
This 12 months has been a record-breaking one for SpaceX. The corporate has carried out 44 missions and broken several turnaround records multiple times in only six months, a testament to its launch tempo.
Starlink launches dominated SpaceX’s schedule with 22 out of the 41 Falcon 9 launches this 12 months having been dedicated to Starlink. This included the beginning of deployment of Starlink v2 Mini satellites — a downsized version of the Starlink v2 satellite made to suit inside Falcon 9’s payload fairing.
The corporate also continued its smallsat rideshare program with the launch of the sixth, seventh, and eighth Transporter missions. These three missions carried a combined variety of 237 payloads for multiple smallsat customers.
This 12 months saw the debut of a brand new configuration for the MVacD engine. This configuration includes a shorter nozzle extension geared toward reducing the fee and manufacturing time for the one expendable engine on Falcon 9. This permits the corporate to extend production volume and reduce the fee of the MVacD engine.
The primary half of 2023 also saw the launch of 4 Dragon missions to the International Space Station — also a record. Two of those were crewed missions, Crew-6 and Axiom-2, that brought the full of individuals launched into orbit by SpaceX to 38.
Falcon Heavy also launched twice carrying multiple payloads directly into geosynchronous orbit. The second of those two launches featured the primary fully expendable Falcon Heavy mission as well.
This 12 months also saw the debut of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the world’s largest and strongest rocket ever launched. The corporate is now working toward at the very least three more launches of this rocket this 12 months, with the primary of those set to happen no sooner than August.
Because it currently stands, SpaceX is on target to launch 91 missions if it were to maintain the present cadence. Nonetheless, this may occasionally not be the case, because it has been usual for the corporate to extend its cadence within the second half of each recent 12 months.
For instance, in 2022 the corporate had launched 27 missions in the primary half of the 12 months and 34 within the second half. Assuming an analogous proportion of launches, this could mean SpaceX could launch 99 times this 12 months, only one mission wanting its goal of 100 launches in 2023.
Two major problems have seemingly been dragging SpaceX’s schedule behind its goal goal: a slow cadence at the beginning of the 12 months from the corporate’s launch pad on the US west coast and the shortcoming to extend cadence at Launch Complex 39A attributable to multiple conflicts.
In the beginning of the 12 months, SpaceX had got down to launch at the very least 30 times this 12 months from Vandenberg, meaning that it might have needed a median 12-day turnaround from the west coast launch pad.
Nonetheless, the beginning of the 12 months featured an unusual weather pattern off the coast of California. Multiple launches were delayed for several days as a consequence of it and these delays accrued over time. SpaceX has been capable of make up for it in recent missions, breaking the record launch pad turnaround time twice — the most recent being nine days, nine hours, and 44 minutes between Transporter-8 and Starlink Group 5-7.
Alternatively, Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) has been mostly used for Falcon Heavy and Dragon missions this 12 months. In consequence, the launch pad has supported fewer launches than it did at this same moment last 12 months.
LC-39A is the one launch pad that may support Falcon Heavy missions and it needs several days of labor to configure it either for Falcon Heavy or Falcon 9 missions. Over the course of the 12 months, multiple Falcon Heavy missions have seen delays attributable to the readiness of their payloads, sometimes reshaping the entire LC-39A manifest for the remainder of the 12 months.
Sometimes the reconfiguration work was already well underway to have the ability to then undo it, launch a Falcon 9 mission, after which restart that work and launch a Falcon Heavy mission. That is the case of the launchpad’s next launch which was previously scheduled to feature the USSF-52 mission for the US Department of Defense using a Falcon Heavy rocket.
This launch is now scheduled to occur no sooner than September of this 12 months attributable to payload-related delays. The following launch from LC-39A is now planned to hold the Echostar 24 satellite also atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The gap between the last launch, CRS-28, and this one will likely be of over 40 days, a span of time that might have allowed two and even three regular Falcon 9 missions if it weren’t for all the conditions mentioned above.
Even when the corporate were to seek out time and reallocate work to perform a Falcon 9 mission from LC-39A, it might have to feature a return to launch site (RTLS) landing for the primary stage. It’s because the corporate’s two drone ships on the east coast are already used for the regular cadence of launches from SLC-40. No mission featuring an RTLS landing is anticipated in Florida until at the very least August.
This problem also brings into query the fate of SpaceX’s schedule from Florida when the Echostar 24 mission launches in the following month or so. This launch will feature a double drone ship landing, meaning that each drone ships is not going to be available for some other mission happening from the space coast.
For SpaceX to extend its launch tempo in the course of the second half of the 12 months, it’s going to likely have to make more use of its Vandenberg launch pad. Only two known customer missions remain from this launch pad for the remainder of the 12 months, meaning that the corporate could focus solely on Starlink missions to drive up this cadence.
This summer can even feature fewer customer missions from Florida, allowing SpaceX to extend the launch cadence by launching Starlink missions — missions that the corporate can control higher and due to this fact launch at the next cadence.
Some notable missions for the second half of the 12 months include the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission which is able to feature the primary industrial extra-vehicular activity in orbit.
One other notable mission includes the launch of NASA’s Psyche mission set to review a metallic asteroid of the identical name.
Starting up the second half of the 12 months next week can also be one other notable mission, ESA’s Euclid observatory, which is able to study dark matter and dark energy in our universe. This mission is ready to launch no sooner than July 1 at 11:11 AM EDT (15:11 UTC).