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Kicking off the month of December for SpaceX is a Falcon 9 ride share mission with a payload of 25 spacecraft on board. The launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base is headlined by the Korea 425 mission.
The rocket is ready to lift off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at 10:19 a.m. PST (1:19 EST, 1819 UTC). The launch is ready to be the primary of two missions SpaceX plans to launch over the weekend.
Spaceflight Now may have live coverage on Launchpad Live starting about half-hour before liftoff.
The booster for the mission, B1061, will probably be making its seventeenth flight after previously launching the Crew-1 and Crew-2 missions together with the fourth and fifth Transporter rideshare missions. This launch can even mark the primary time a Falcon 9 first stage with greater than 15 previous flight will support a non-Starlink mission.
Following launch, the booster is ready to land back at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) at VSFB about eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.
Headlining the slate of 25 spacecraft on board the Friday morning launch is a satellite for South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development (ADD) and its 425 Project. It includes a 30cm resolution electro-optic (EO) and infrared (IR) sensors.
A spokesperson for the agency told the press earlier this month that this will probably be the country’s first military spy satellite with 4 additional satellites launching by 2025.
Those additional 4 SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellites are being developed by Thales Alenia Space in partnership with Aerospace Industries, LTD. and Hanwha Systems Corporation.
“Thales Alenia Space is honored to have earned the boldness of the Korean Ministry of Defense and other authorities involved on this project, who recognized our proven track record in delivering state-of-the-art commentary satellites,” said Donato Amoroso, Senior Vice-President, Commentary, Exploration and Navigation at Thales Alenia Space, in a 2018 statement.
The contact for the satellites is price $930 million, per DefenseNews.
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In response to a 2022 report in The JoongAng, the satellite launching on Friday together with the 4 SAR satellites will launch to an orbit between 600 and 700 km above the Earth’s surface and are designed to observe North Korea every two hours.
The mission launch comes on the heels of North Korea’s claims that it successfully launched its own spy satellite on Nov. 21, an motion that was condemned by several nations, including the US. The U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the launch using ballistic missile technology was “a brazen violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions,” adding that it “risks destabilizing the safety situation within the region and beyond.”
Along for the ride
Along with the EO/IR satellite for South Korea, SpaceX said there are 25 additional spacecraft hitching a ride on the Falcon 9 rocket.
While it doesn’t give an exhaustive list, it does name the next payloads:
- Space BD’s ISL48
- SITAEL’s uHETSat
- D-Orbit’s ION SCV Daring Diego
- York Space Systems’ Bane
- PlanetiQ’s GNOMES-4
SITAEL S.p.A.’s uHETSat is a MicroSat mission supported by the European Space Agency (ESA). It features an electrical propulsion system referred to as a Hall Effect Thruster and is powered by xenon propellant.
ESA said in statement, the satellite will start at a 550 km altitude orbit and “the goal is to attain at the very least 1,000 ignition cycles and a single ignition to surpass 600 seconds.”
An revolutionary compact electric propulsion system from @SITAELspa been cleared to fly on the @ESA-supported µHETSat technology demonstration microsatellite mission, resulting from launch by yr’s end https://t.co/rNVFq4nj2G pic.twitter.com/oT8NTTs5qj
— ESA Technology (@ESA_Tech) June 27, 2023
In response to a Nov. 9, 2023, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing, the Satellite Programs and Policy Division gave PlanetiQ permission to deploy its GNOMES-4 satellite beret 505 and 545 km at an inclination between 97 and 98 degrees.
It’s allowed “to operate GNOMES-4 at altitudes from roughly 525 kilometers all the way down to roughly 430 km, and with an inclination of 97.6 degrees (+/- 0.5 degrees) in sun-synchronous orbit, allowing for natural orbital decay.”
An ESA writeup of previous GNOMES constellation satellites describes them as “first business constellation of GNSS-RO (Global Navigation Satellite System-Radio Occultation) weather satellites.” It notes that there are 20 such satellites planned for the constellation.
GNOMES stands for GNSS Navigation and Occultation Measurement Satellites. The primary of those launched back in August 2020 and so they’re manufactured by Blue Canyon Technologies in Boulder, Colorado.
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Other payloads flying on the mission include KOYOH, a MicroSat from Kanazawa University in Japan and Ireland’s first satellite, a 2U CubeSat called EIRSAT-1 (Educational Irish Research Satellite) built by students and college at University College Dublin.
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