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Space

Watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch - the First of Its Five Missions This Year (youtube.com) 31

Posted by EditorDavid from the 3-2-1 dept.
Watch a rare launch of SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket livestreamed on SpaceX's YouTube channel.

"Nearly five years have passed since the massive Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful debut launch in February 2018," writes Ars Technica.

"Since then, however, SpaceX's heavy lift rocket has flown just three additional times." Why? It's partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense. But now this trickle of Falcon Heavy launches may turn into a flood. [Sunday's launch is the first of potentially five launches this year]

SpaceX completed a hot fire test of the rocket on Tuesday, and declared that the vehicle was ready for liftoff. The rocket will use a brand new core stage, and side-mounted boosters that have flown into space one time, as side-mounted boosters on the USSF-44 Falcon Heavy mission that launched on November 1 2022.
What's it carrying? Space.com writes: The main payload is a military communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM 2, which the Falcon Heavy will send to geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above Earth. Also flying Saturday is a rideshare spacecraft called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A, a payload adapter that can hold up to six small satellites, according to EverydayAstronaut.com. LDPE-3A will carry five Space Force payloads on USSF-67. Among them are "two operational prototypes for enhanced situational awareness and an operational prototype crypto/interface encryption payload providing secure space-to-ground communications capability," Space Force officials said in an emailed statement on Friday....

If all goes according to plan, the two side boosters will come back to Earth shortly after liftoff on Sunday, making vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The central booster will not return, instead ditching into the Atlantic Ocean....

USSF-67 is part of a busy week for SpaceX. The company also plans to launch 51 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 on Thursday, January 19.
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Watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch - the First of Its Five Missions This Year More

Watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch - the First of Its Five Missions This Year

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  • For a moment I thought they were going to boldly go where no one has gone before.

  • One more successful launch and wo more successful landings.

    • It wasn't that long ago that merely landing the rockets was considered a marvel of science and now it's just expected. It's amazing how quickly SpaceX has progressed.

      I'm looking forward to seeing Starship missions.

  • Still Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Sunday January 15, 2023 @06:12PM (#63211216)

    Congratulations to SpaceX for the reliability they have achieved.

    Elons appetite for R&D risk is phenomenal. He is happy to employ the 80:20 rule of iterative development, even though the 20% has in the development phase resulted in expensive 'RUD'. Most other firms are more toward 99:1 in risk appetite which although making for a more predictable outcome, costs way-way more in development time and expenditure.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's one of the reasons I'm proud to work at SpaceX: We're not afraid of failure.

      It's also why I don't understand Musk's hate club. They love to harp on the failures eternally, and failure is all that ever matters to them. Whenever one of these big ideas succeed, they act like it doesn't matter, because look at all of these failures.

      • We still get "news" reporters saying SpaceX hasn't had a successful launch yet because Starship hasn't gone orbital. There's a lot of nearly gleeful hate being hurled at SpaceX, and I think we're going to see that increase as they take more and more of the launch capacity of the US due to their actual success. The old NASA contractors are going to start seeing their never-ending money streams slow to a trickle due to SpaceX being so good at what they do. And I can promise you, the public hate for SpaceX wil

  • Geostationary orbit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Sunday January 15, 2023 @06:35PM (#63211234)
    I'm a little surprised geostationary is still considered a desirable location for comms satellites. Starlink has commoditized the production of phased array antenna for solid-state tracking of satellites across the sky and they are so much closer (lower) = less latency and more bandwidth for less power.

    • Re:Geostationary orbit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday January 15, 2023 @06:45PM (#63211238) Homepage

      The latency is high and there are not many orbital allied available for GEOs, but you only need one to serve a fixed part of the planet, that one GEO can serve users across most of a hemisphere, and ground stations only have one basic direction to point their antennas.

      • The latency is high and there are not many orbital allied available for GEOs, but you only need one to serve a fixed part of the planet, that one GEO can serve users across most of a hemisphere, and ground stations only have one basic direction to point their antennas.

        And a satellite can stay there for quite a while ... From Satellite Life Extension: Reaching for the Holy Grail [satellitetoday.com]:

        The useful lifetime of geosynchronous orbit satellites averages about fifteen years – a limit primarily imposed by the exhaustion of propellant aboard.

        Other search results note an average lifespan in GEO of at least 8 years while LEO is only 5 years.

        • So what are the chances they will save some fuel to do a de-orbit burn at end of mission? Geostationary space junk is building up https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multim... [esa.int]

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Entrope ( 68843 )

            GEOs don't de-orbit. They plan to use their final propellant to move into a graveyard orbit [wikipedia.org] in hopes that somebody will come up with a solution before Kessler syndrome kicks in. (And sometimes they even succeed at moving up into the recommended graveyard orbit.)

          • The chances are pretty good. Geostationary satellites are supposed to save enough fuel to change the orbit at end of life. Obviously, if something goes disastrously wrong, it can't do that (which is unfortunately somewhat common), but it's built into the mission plan.

            https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs... [dtic.mil]

            Note: satellites in high orbits don't "de-orbit", as there isn't enough fuel for that. So they go further out into a "graveyard orbit" a few hundred km beyond geostationary orbit.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Obviously, if something goes disastrously wrong, it can't do that (which is unfortunately somewhat common)

              It's less of a problem though, because they're all in the same orbit. You don't get any high speed collisions.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        They're also much harder to shoot down.

    • Not my field, but I would guess that the big expensive military sats are quite a bit harder to nuclear attack. One nuke in LEO and most of Starlink would probably come down like a bunch of dead mosquitos. Those milsats are probably hardened against anything except a really close-in attack.

      They probably also offer diferent encryption schemes, and maybe a whole host of other signal-processing goodies that civilian equipment doesn’t do.

      • A nuclear weapon would be overkill for that, but either way any kind of EMP designed to have any kind of appreciable impact is going to have pretty devastating consequences to any infrastructure on the ground. If you're not fucking over your own infrastructure, then you had better be prepared to declare war on whoever you are fucking over.

    • Starlink's strategy only works if you have a whole constellation of equal satellites, and in the majority of cases you only have one satellite to do the job and normally you don't need to serve the entire globe with this satellite.

    • GEO is desirable for broadcast satellites because you can launch just one instead of thousands. It seems this satellite will be used for broadcasting as well:

      The mission of CBAS is to augment existing military satellite communications capabilities and broadcast military data continuously through space-based, satellite communications relay links.

  • I grew up with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Watching the giant Saturn V booster fall into the Atlantic was just how things were done. When SpaceX drops one of their launch vehicles back onto a pad in one piece I get what used to pass for a woody. And two at once? Pass the kleenex.

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