Blue Origin tested its second human-rated New Shepard capsule this week, which had been delayed twice since the start of the month. The week has also seen two launches from China while a fourth flight of the Japanese H3 rocket carrying a communications satellite for the Japanese military has now been delayed until next week.
Two planned Starlink missions have taken place on Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral from the same pad, exactly three days apart. Meanwhile, Falcon 9 has also flown a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office from the West Coast.
SpaceX has picked up its cadence following Falcon 9’s recent return-to-flight and is quickly approaching its 400th orbital mission. The company began the week at 398 total missions, following the launch of the OneWeb #20 mission from California. The company reached its 400th orbital flight with the NROL-167 mission out of Vandenberg this week. Just as impressive, SpaceX launched a Falcon vehicle for the 100th time this year on the OneWeb mission, having already broken last year’s record of 98 launches. To put this into context, a quarter of all SpaceX launches in the company’s history will have taken place this year alone.
Falcon 9 launches the OneWeb #20 mission, SpaceX’s 100th orbital launch of the year. (Credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX launched five times in less than six days last week, with a launch from each of its four launch sites, including Starbase, and igniting 87 first-stage engines in the process. The milestone OneWeb mission was the company’s sixth successful launch in seven days. LC-39A is currently being reconfigured for Falcon 9 flights, leaving Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) on the east coast and Vandenberg’s SLC-4E on the west coast to handle the Falcon 9 launch manifest.
Marking China’s 50th launch of 2024, a Chang Zheng 6 (CZ-6) rocket took flight from LC-16 at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the Shanxi Province of China on Tuesday, Oct 22, at 00:10 UTC. On board were the Tianping-3A(01), B(01), and B(02) satellites, which will be used by ground-based services as orbital radar calibration targets and will also assist with orbital prediction model refinement. This single-core launch vehicle burns liquid kerosene and oxygen and has been active since 2015. CZ-6 has launched 12 times to date, most recently with Geely’s Future Mobility Constellation Group 3.
Chang Zheng 6 on pad LC-16 at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. (Credit: CASC)
The CZ-6 family of rockets all launch from the inland Taiyuan launch site and now includes the taller CZ-6C rocket, which took its maiden, and so far only, flight this May. This is a booster-less variant of the newer medium-lift CZ-6A rocket, which was China’s first rocket to add solid rocket boosters (SRBs).
Chang Zheng 2C | Yaogan 43 Group 03
Another batch of remote sensing satellites for the Chinese military has been carried to low-Earth orbit aboard a Chang Zheng 2C (CZ-2C) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China. Liftoff took place from pad LC-3 on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 01:09 UTC at the start of a short 17-minute launch window.
Standing 42 m tall with a 3.35 m wide fairing, the long-established CZ-2C has been active since 1982 and has 78 missions under its belt. Most recently, CZ-2C carried the Space Variable Objects Monitor, or SVOM, to low-Earth orbit in June — a French/Chinese X-ray telescope project to study gamma-ray bursts from the explosions of massive stars.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-27 mission lifts off (Credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin successfully launched an uncrewed suborbital mission on Wednesday, Oct. 23, to verify its second human-rated New Shepard capsule, the RSS Kármán Line. Launching from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas, liftoff took place at 7:27 AM CDT (15:27 UTC).
The main engine cut-off was at an altitude of 60 km and, following separation, Booster 5 landed successfully back at the site seven minutes into the mission, having reached a velocity of 4,000 km/h as it descended. The initial launch attempt on Oct. 7 had been scrubbed following an extended hold while the technical team attempted to troubleshoot an issue with the vehicle. The company also scrubbed an attempt on Oct. 13.
The eight previous crewed launches have used Booster 4 and the RSS First Step capsule. The NS-27 mission set out to debut and verify that RSS Kármán Line and Booster 5 meet Blue Origin’s needs and perform as expected as the company’s launch manifest increases. The vehicle featured an updated livery and technology upgrades that improved its performance and reusability. The new capsule’s name refers to the boundary line that is widely regarded as the start of space.
New Shepard Booster 5 lands (Credit: Blue Origin)
Among the new upgrades was an accommodation for carrying payloads on the booster — five of which were carried on this flight — while another seven were inside the crew capsule. New navigation systems developed for the New Shepard and New Glenn vehicles were among these payloads, alongside two different Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors for the Lunar Permanence program. NS-27 was also carrying some ultra-wideband sensors as part of a NASA TechFlights grant and some reproductions of the black monoliths from the classic space movie 2001: A Space Odyssey for Spacemanic. As with other New Shepard flights, tens of thousands of student-designed postcards from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future program also flew onboard.
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-61
A Falcon 9 launched the Starlink 6-61 mission on Wednesday, Oct. 23, from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 5:47 PM EDT (21:47 UTC). This mission had been attempted the day before and progressively delayed further into the launch window due to recovery weather concerns before being rescheduled.
Falcon 9 launches Starlink 6-61 from SLC-40 at CCSFB on Oct. 23 (Credit: SpaceX)
The payload onboard was another batch of 23 Starlink v2 Mini satellites, headed into an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the equator. The booster supporting this mission was B1073 on its 18th flight. Active since May 2022, this booster has previously carried the CRS-27 cargo mission to the International Space Station. It has also supported the Hakuto-R, SES-22, Amazonas Nexus, and Bandwagon-1 rideshare missions, in addition to 12 previous Starlink launches. B1073 landed successfully on the autonomous drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was stationed approximately 600 km downrange in the Atlantic.
SpaceX’s Starlink service provides high-speed internet access across over 100 countries and has more than 4 million subscribers, most recently adding Samoa and the island nation of Vanuatu this month. At the end of last week, SpaceX had launched 7,105 satellites, of which 6,150 have moved into their operational orbit.
A stack of Starlink v2 Mini satellites before being enclosed in their fairing. (Credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX recently filed a request to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking a modification to its current license regarding the second-generation Starlink satellites (v2). The request includes lowering the satellites’ altitude by 45 km to as low as 475 km. The request also proposes that the satellites’ bandwidth be increased to gigabit-per-second speeds through more powerful antennas and that the satellites access additional spectrum in the E band. The heavier, full versions of the v2 satellites will require Starship to carry them to orbit and look to be renamed to v3 from the FCC request document.
Falcon 9 has carried a payload to low-Earth orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) on the NROL-167 mission. This is suspected to be the fourth batch of Starshield satellites launched for the agency as part of a $1.8 billion contract. Liftoff occurred on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 10:13 AM PDT (17:13 UTC) from SLC-4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Aerial view of SLC-4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base with a Falcon 9 being prepared for flight. (Credit: SpaceX)
The booster supporting this mission was B1063 on its 21st flight, which successfully landed downrange on the autonomous droneship Of Course I Still Love You. Active since late 2020, this booster supported the DART mission, Transporter 7, and previously the NROL-113 mission for the same customer. It has also supported 14 Starlink missions dating back to the very early V1 group 28 in 2021, and the ill-fated Group 9-3 mission which suffered the second-stage anomaly in July. As mentioned, NROL-167 served as SpaceX’s 400th orbital launch of all time, Falcon 9’s 100th mission of 2024, and the 195th orbital launch attempt worldwide in 2024.
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 10-8
Another batch of 23 Starlink v2 Mini satellites was carried to low-Earth orbit on Saturday, Oct. 26. Lift-off took place at 5:47 PM EDT (21:47 UTC), at the start of a four-hour launch window, from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. This followed the previous Starlink mission from the same pad for exactly three days. The available time between the two launches was a few hours over SLC-40’s current record turnaround time of 2 days, 19 hours, and 40 minutes.
Falcon 9 carried the payload, the tenth for this Group 10 shell, on a Northeasterly trajectory. The booster supporting this mission was B1069 on its 19th flight. This booster’s maiden flight supported the CRS-24 cargo mission to the International Space Station in the final days of 2021. Since then it has also carried OneWeb 15, Hotbird 13F, and the SES-18 & 19 mission, although Starlink flights have dominated its manifest for the last year and a half. B1069 has already lofted two other batches for this Group 10 shell amongst 14 missions for this constellation. The booster successfully landed on the autonomous drone ship Just Read The Instructions which was located downrange, approximately eight minutes into the mission, and marked the 100th reflight of a booster by SpaceX this year.
Render of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 in its 22S configuration. (Credit: JAXA)
A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 launcher, in its 22S configuration, is set to launch a geostationary communications satellite on Wednesday, Oct. 30, at 06:46 UTC at the start of a launch window lasting nearly two hours. This launch has been delayed from earlier plans to fly this Saturday, Oct. 26. Operated by the DSN Corporation, DSN-3, also known as Kirameki 3, will operate in the X-band for the Japanese military.
H3 is expected to fly from pad LA-Y2 at the Yoshinobu Launch Complex at the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. This will be the third flight of this rocket this year, with all three flying in the 22S configuration. “22S” denotes two LE-9 engines on the main stage burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, two SRB-3 side boosters, and a short-length payload fairing.
This same configuration is expected to fly once more before the end of the year carrying the Michibiki 5 navigation satellite. A four-booster version with a longer fairing, the 24L configuration, will debut next September with the first HTV-X cargo transport vehicle to fly to the International Space Station (ISS). This is the next-generation version of the HTV, which carried cargo to the ISS nine times between 2009 and 2020. The 50th and final flight of H3’s predecessor, the H-IIA, will be the GOSAT-GW mission, which is also expected to fly before the end of the year.
Render of the HTV-X approaching the International Space Station (Credit: JAXA)
There are also plans for H3 to launch the robotic Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) next year to the Moon’s south pole — a joint project developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). What’s more, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries signed an agreement this week for H3 to launch the MBR Explorer mission in 2028 for the United Arab Emirates. This probe will visit seven asteroids during its mission and will attempt to land on one.
(Lead image: Falcon 9 launches NROL-167 from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base -SpaceX’s 400th orbital mission. Credit: SpaceX)
