Yet another day of severe storms rolled through Central Florida on Thursday with lightning striking the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center where SpaceX had its latest Falcon Heavy rocket awaiting launch. The delay meant the chance for SpaceX to send up two rockets from the Space Coast within 2 1/2 hours of one another on Friday, and while it did manage a Falcon 9 liftoff, the Falcon Heavy attempt was aborted in the last minute of the countdown.
What was a success though was the Falcon liftoff among heavy cloud cover at 6:12 p.m. from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40, which sent up the SES 03b mPOWER-B satellite to medium-Earth orbit. It marked the 20th launch from the Space Coast in 2023.
The first-stage booster flew for the second time having previously been used on the NASA Crew-6 mission. The company was able to once again recover it on the droneship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Space Coast’s 21st launch, though, will have to wait as a planned 8:26 p.m. launch from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A that would have set a record for SpaceX for time between launches was called off with 59 seconds on the clock. The next chance for liftoff is during a 57-minute window Saturday that runs from 7:29-8:26 p.m.
Its main payload is the ViaSat-3 Americas broadband communications satellite, the first of three planned for the company headed for geostationary orbit. Also flying are the Astranis MicroGEO satellite and Gravity Space’s GS-1 satellite.
The Falcon Heavy has been vertical at the pad since Tuesday, but storms put a stop to launch efforts two days in row including a bolt of lightning hitting the towers surrounding the pad on Thursday night.
“Last night’s storm in Florida produced hail, tornadoes and lightning,” the company posted Friday with an image of a lightning strike hitting one of the protective towers surrounding Launch Pad 39-A. “Following this strike on the tower at 39A, teams performed additional checkouts of Falcon Heavy, the payloads, and ground support equipment. All systems are looking good.”
The company did not give a reason for the abort of Friday’s attempt.
Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket that launches with any regularity on the market, essentially three Falcon 9′s strapped together.
Because of the required target insertion, though, SpaceX will forego the normal attempts to recover the three Falcon Heavy boosters, so no sonic booms are in order for the launch.
The first ViaSat-3 satellite, with a payload integrated into a structure built by Boeing Satellite Systems, will have a coverage area that will include the majority North America including the continental U.S. and Mexico as well as all of the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Plans are for it to be operational in June, after which it’s projected to be able to deliver up to 1 terabit of data per second in the Ka-band of frequencies, the same range that is planned for Amazon’s Project Kuiper when it launches in a few years.
“There are several entrants into this frequency regime,” said Viasat executive Dave Ryan. “Some are there, some are not quite there yet, but it’s a very big marketplace. We believe it definitely can support multiple people in the market.”
The next ViaSat-3 satellite will aim to cover Europe, the Middle East and Africa followed by the final satellite for Asia and the Pacific for near global coverage. Right now all of its satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, but it has worked in LEO in the past.
“We believe in the future that a multiorbit strategy is going to be ultimately the best idea because each orbit has its pros and cons,” he said. “Geosynchronous orbit is by far and away the most efficient to deliver broadband capacity to the Earth.”
Each launch could come six to nine months after one another. The next will come on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, with the final launch provider to be determined.
“Nearly half of the capacity of the ViaSat-3 fleet is designed to be available to areas that are currently unconnected or underserved — and the constellation will have the flexibility to move bandwidth from low-demand areas to high-demand areas,” the company stated in a press release.
It’s the second Falcon Heavy launch of as many as five planned for 2023. The 5.1 million pounds of thrust is more than double that of United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, but shy of the power of NASA’s Space Launch System that launched just once last fall, and miniscule compared to the more than 17 million pounds of thrust that was produced by SpaceX’s Starship test flight last week that ended with it exploding before reaching space.
Falcon Heavy is powered by 27 Merlin engines across the three first stages. After this launch, SpaceX has one planned for the Space Force dubbed USSF-52 expected in the first half of 2023, a private telecom satellite launch for Hughes Network Systems called the Jupiter 3 and the October launch of NASA’s Psyche probe headed the metal-rich asteroid of the same name that orbits the sun beyond Mars.
Its first-ever flight was in 2018, a test launch that sent up Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster into space. SpaceX followed that up with a commercial payload in April 2019, a Department of Defense mission in June 2019, then a three-year drought before knocking out two launches in the last six months.
If Falcon Heavy had lifted off, it would have set a record for SpaceX for time in between missions, which for now remains four hours and 17 minutes set between two SpaceX launches from California and Cape Canaveral the company flew on March 17.
Even if it had launched, though, it wouldn’t beat the all-time record between launches, which was set on Nov. 11, 1966 when the Gemini XII mission commanded by James Lovell along with Buzz Aldrin launched atop a Titan II rocket from what was then Cape Kennedy’s Launch Complex 19 a little under 99 minutes after the mission’s Agena Target Vehicle launched one mile south at Launch Complex 14. The Gemini and Agena vehicles were launched in tandem during the program that laid the groundwork for the Apollo moon missions.
Excluding Starship, which did not make orbit, SpaceX has now flown 28 missions across its three other launch facilities including eight from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
While Falcon Heavy was a hold, the Falcon 9 success followed another Falcon 9 launch Thursday from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 4 East that carried up 46 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites to low-Earth orbit.
The first stage booster flew for the 13th time and the company was able to recovery it on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean. To date the company has flown 226 successful orbital missions managing 188 booster recoveries allowing for 158 reflights of those boosters.
If it manages the KSC ViaSat-3 launch before Sunday, it will have completed 28 for the year through the first four months. It managed 61 launches in 2022 and this year could see as many as 100, according to company CEO Elon Musk, with the majority coming from the Space Coast.
