SpaceX will push the envelope with record-breaking 16th Falcon 9 booster flight – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX will test the limits of its Falcon 9 reusable rocket Sunday night when it launches a booster on a record-breaking 16th flight. The launch was originally scheduled before sunrise on Sunday, but SpaceX chose to target a rare 12-hour backup opportunity after evening, 13 minutes after sunset. Falcon 9 is now scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral at 20:36 EDT (0036 UTC Monday) with the fifth batch of second generation Starlink satellites.

The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts aboard a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavor capsule. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA Worm logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including launches of South Korea’s Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-sharing missions, and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already completed, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Initially, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

We arrived at 10 [flights] and the vehicles still looked good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15, Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview the year last.

SpaceX is now pushing the envelope further by exceeding the previously certified limit of 15 flights. More than 200 days have passed since booster 1058’s last flight. During that time SpaceX is likely to have conducted extensive inspections and refurbishments to free up the rocket for further launches.

For its sixteenth journey into space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink V2 mini satellites into orbit, in a mission dubbed Starlink 6-5.

After taking off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, it will head southeast, aiming for an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the equator. After separating from the second stage for approximately two and a half minutes of flight, booster 1058 will arc down for a landing on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic east of the Bahamas.

Two second stage burns will be required to place the satellites into the required 323 by 315 km orbit. The separation of the 22 satellites should take place just over an hour after the start of the flight.

It will be the fifth launch of the so-called V2 mini satellites which are larger and have four times the bandwidth of previous models. The full-size Starlink V2 satellites are expected to be launched from SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship vehicle, but Starship’s delayed debut led SpaceX to create a condensed version of the satellites so they could be launched on Falcon 9.

According to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and highly respected expert on spaceflight activities, this mission will bring the total number of Starlink spacecraft launched to 4,768 and the number of Starlink satellites currently in orbit to 4,435.

In early May, SpaceX announced it had 1.5 million Starlink subscribers. Internet service is available in more than 56 countries.