SpaceX successfully launches Starlink satellites despite weather delay
Despite a weather scare, SpaceX successfully launched another 56 Starlink internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space For Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 on Friday.
The launch looked to be in danger after a line of storms strafed Central Florida, bringing severe weather into Brevard County.
SpaceX scheduled its initial launch attempt at 9:56 a.m. before moving to a successful second target of 11:35 a.m. after the storms cleared. It was the company’s 30th mission of 2023 from the Space Coast.
The first-stage booster, flying for the ninth time, landed on the company’s droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas downrange in the Atlantic.
Elon Musk’s company had already flown 29 of the 31 launches from the Space Coast with just the early Thursday launch of ULA’s Delta IV Heavy for the National Reconnaissance Office and a March liftoff of Relativity Space’s 3D-printed Terran 1 as the only other rocket action from Florida.
In addition, SpaceX has flown 13 times from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as well as the test launch attempt of its in-development Starship and Super Heavy from its Boca Chica, Texas, launch facility Starbase.
Musk has said the company could execute as many as 100 launches among all of its facilities by the end of the year.
With this mission, SpaceX will have managed 43 orbital launches not including Starship. Among those are the year’s only U.S.-based crewed flights — two from Kennedy Space Center — as well as a pair of its powerhouse Falcon Heavy launches from KSC.
It has at least two more crewed flights planned for 2023 including Crew-7 for NASA in mid-August and the Polaris Dawn flight for billionaire Jared Isaacman now slated for the fourth quarter of the year. Spectacle-wise, it also has three more planned launches of Falcon Heavy including the October mission to launch NASA’s Psyche probe to explore an asteroid of the same name.
Those flights are on top of a regular cadence of Starlink and other satellite launches while also pursuing the next test flight of Starship from Texas.
ULA meanwhile has faced delays on several of its planned launches for the year so the NROL-68 flight on the second-to-last ever Delta IV Heavy marked its first launch in more than six months, and first from the Space Coast since October 2022.
The crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on a ULA Atlas V was recently delayed from a planned July liftoff that now won’t get an opportunity to fly until at least November. Meanwhile ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket awaits the results of an investigation into a fireball incident that damaged ULA’s testing facilities in Alabama before it will let it fly for the first time.
The replacement rocket for both Atlas and Delta, Vulcan Centaur has dozens of missions lined up in the next five years so that ULA managers expect to get to a pace of one launch every two weeks. Meanwhile, SpaceX is already this year approaching an average of two launches every week.
Source: Orlando Sentinel
