SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites, bringing the size of the constellation to 240 satellites.
They also successfully recovered the first stage, which was making its third flight. They also caught one of the two fairing halves in the ship net, recovering the second half out of the ocean.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
3 China
2 SpaceX
1 Arianespace (Europe)
The launch replay is embedded below the fold.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites, bringing the size of the constellation to 240 satellites.
They also successfully recovered the first stage, which was making its third flight. They also caught one of the two fairing halves in the ship net, recovering the second half out of the ocean.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
3 China
2 SpaceX
1 Arianespace (Europe)
The launch replay is embedded below the fold.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Did they succeed with the fairing recoveries?
MDN: I have updated the post. One fairing captured in the net, the other recovered from the ocean.
Third landing for this core, having now launched from all three launch pads.
So their Starlink missions have mostly used 3rd and 4th flight of boosters. Talk about reducing costs!
Now if only they would release costs on refurb, and how much cheaper a re-flown booster is vs a new one.
Interestingly if you look at the Wiki tracking cores, there have not been a lot of new cores added to the fleet in a while. Seems like manufacturing rate of Booster cores is severly reduced or else they are storing a bunch of them somewhere.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/cores
Nice problem to have. Too many usable cores to refly…
Pleasantly surprised to see video of the fairing, and nice to see the barge landing without the signal dropping off at the last second.
There’s a nice view of the shockwave–>
https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=745
Given that F9 1st and 2nd stages are made on mostly the same tooling, the reduction in S1 construction has almost certainly been compensated for by increased S2 construction to support the desired mission cadence. I wouldn’t be surprised if S2 production never slackened last year, even though the overall mission count was down. It would be good to have a stash of new S2’s in the barn going into 2020 to support the planned tripling or more of average launch cadence.