Man, holiday weekend and almost nobody shows up. Ho hum, another day, another deploy.
LAUNCH! SpaceX Falcon 9 B1052-7 launches with Starlink Group 4-20 from SLC-40.Overview:nasaspaceflight.com/2022/09/starli…SpaceX Livestream:youtube.com/watch?v=NONM-x…
Staging 1-2
SpaceX Falcon 9 B1052-7 lands on drone ship Just Read The Instructions.And that one is very much a bullseye!
Consolation PrizeSpaceX launched Starlink rideshare mission 4-20 tonight, much to the delight of crowds that have remained on the Space Coast after SLS attempts. Read more from @NASASpaceflight nasaspaceflight.com/2022/09/starli…
Old and New. A defunct cold war era ATT Longlines tower watches over a SpaceX Falcon 9 lofting Starlink Group 4-20 into orbit. @NASASpaceflight
Launch of Falcon 9 with tonight's Starlink mission. @NASASpaceflight nasaspaceflight.com/2022/09/starli…
SpaceX Falcon 9 departs SLC-40 with Starlink 4-20, and rideshare Varuna-TDM. Story: nasaspaceflight.com/2022/09/starli…📸 for @NASASpaceflight
Great photos of what appears to be F9's deorbit burn.
#falcon9 upper stage form the recent #Starlink launch just made a beautiful burn just over Bordeaux. The cameras were set up for the 2 mag satellites, not a bright, beautiful show...
A quick timelapse video of the #falcon9 deorbit burn.
Falcon 9 beams into the night sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida at 10:09 p.m. this evening with 51 Starlink satellites and Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC rideshare payload
Falcon punches through a light cloud layer on the way to orbit with 51 Starlink satellites and Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC rideshare payload
Falcon 9 launches 51 Starlink satellites and Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC to orbit
Congrats to my friends at Benchmark, whose nontoxic storable propulsion system made it uphill tonight for the first time on the Falcon 9 launch!
Keeping an eye today for any potential changes to the Falcon 9 launch countdown sequence. Last launch had LOX load wrapped up later than usual. This is in order to keep LOX being loaded as late as possible and helps keep it as cold as possible much closer to launch.
Which in turn means an improvement in performance. More mass of propellant in the tanks for no added dry mass means more delta-v available. Denser propellant also means more flow rate into the engine which largely means more thrust.
The colder temperatures bring its own issues though, not just because of the COPVs inside the LOX tanks as we saw back in 2016 with Amos 6 but also with how you manage a propellant that is denser and, most likely, more viscous.
Viscosity at colder temperatures is of special importance with kerosene for example, it may actually make the engines underperform as it is harder to push through the pumps if it's more viscous.
All in all, this is a careful and gradual process that SpaceX is now doing on their Starlink missions and will for sure mean they'll gather even more data into how to manage cold propellants at temperatures not previously handled by more traditional US launch companies.
Yep this is the late LOX load sequence
