![]() The first stage burned for two and a half minutes before shutting down its engines, again in staggered pairs to reduce loads on the vehicle. One of my remote captures from the DART mission at Vandy last night. Once the Falcon 9 detected that all engines are running nominally, the vehicle commanded the hydraulic clamps at the base of the vehicle to release, letting the vehicle lift off from the pad at T-0. The engines ignite in pairs, with approximately 100 ms between each pair’s ignition, to reduce loads on the vehicle during startup. This surpasses the goal laid out by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that a Falcon 9 Block 5 would be capable of 10 flights without major refurbishment and then continue to fly beyond that.ī1051-11 successfully conducted a static fire early on Friday morning UTC.ī1051 first flew on Dragon 2’s first mission to orbit, SpX DM-1 (SpaceX Demonstration Mission 1), and has since flew 10 times prior to Saturday: B1051 MissionĪt approximately T-2.8 seconds, the Falcon 9 commanded the ignition of its nine Merlin 1D engines. The Falcon 9 first stage supporting this mission is B1051-11, which marks the first 11th flight of a Falcon 9 booster. The dogleg maneuver the second stage performed to get into the proper orbit further reduces the performance of the Falcon 9 and therefore the number of satellites that can be taken to this orbit from Vandenberg. These satellite upgrades have increased the mass of each satellite, which is one of the reasons why only 52 are being launched on this mission as opposed to 60 satellites on most Starlink v1.0 missions. Starlink shell 4 is composed entirely of Starlink v1.5 satellites, which, unlike the v1.0 satellites in shell 1, feature inter-satellite laser communication that allows the satellites to communicate directly with each other and removes the need for ground stations over areas such as the poles. (Working satellite information from Jonathan McDowell’s space report.) ![]() Starlink phase one is split into five different orbital shells: Like previous Starlink missions and many Space Shuttle missions, the mission number does not represent the chronological launch order in this case, Starlink Group 4-4 is launching ahead of Starlink Group 4-2, making this launch the third to the fourth shell. The Starlink Group X-Y nomenclature was introduced after SpaceX completed their first Starlink shell, where the X represents the shell number (1-5) and the Y represents the mission number to that shell. But d espite launching from the west coast, the mission targeted the 53.2° shell – SpaceX’s first launch to a non-polar orbit from Vandenberg. The mission lifted off from SLC-4E (Space Launch Complex 4 East) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Starlink Group 4-4 mission launched 52 Starlink satellites into a 53.22° inclination orbit at 4:41 AM PST (12:41 UTC) Saturday morning. ![]() In the company’s third-to-last launch of 2021, SpaceX deployed another group of Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit early on Saturday morning. ![]()
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