{"id":11880,"date":"2021-02-04T18:34:37","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T10:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/no-spacex-doubleheader-for-now-but-range-is-ready-for-two-launches-in-a-day\/"},"modified":"2021-02-04T18:34:37","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T10:34:37","slug":"no-spacex-doubleheader-for-now-but-range-is-ready-for-two-launches-in-a-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/no-spacex-doubleheader-for-now-but-range-is-ready-for-two-launches-in-a-day\/","title":{"rendered":"No SpaceX doubleheader for now, but range is ready for two launches in a day"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: <\/strong>Updated Feb. 5 with additional launch delay.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early Thursday, while another Falcon 9 stands in the foreground on pad 39A for liftoff this weekend. Credit: SpaceX<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the two Falcon 9 rockets SpaceX planned to take off in a span of less than five hours earlier this week will remain grounded indefinitely, preventing Cape Canaveral from hosting two launches on the same day for the first time in decades.<\/p>\n

But the military-run Eastern Range was ready for the back-to-back missions, and probably won\u2019t have to wait long for the next chance for a launch doubleheader.<\/p>\n

Col. Mark Shoemaker, commander of the 45th Operations Group at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, said Wednesday that the Eastern Range is ready for quicker turnarounds between launches from Florida\u2019s Space Coast.<\/p>\n

The range approved a SpaceX request for two Falcon 9 launches Thursday less than five hours apart, each carrying 60 Starlink internet satellites for SpaceX\u2019s ever-growing broadband network.<\/p>\n

SpaceX successfully launched one of the Falcon 9 rockets at 1:19 a.m. EST (0619 GMT) Thursday from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, but the other mission \u2014 set to launch from pad 39A a few miles to the north at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center \u2014 was delayed from Thursday to Friday, and then again to Sunday.<\/p>\n

On Friday, SpaceX said the Falcon 9 standing on pad 39A will remain grounded to allow teams to perform \u201cadditional inspections before flying one of our fleet-leading boosters.\u201d SpaceX said it continues to prep for a Falcon 9 launch from pad 40 as early as late next week with another batch of Starlink satellites.<\/p>\n

The delays will allow additional time for \u201cpre-launch checks\u201d before the Falcon 9 takes off from pad 39A, according to SpaceX.<\/p>\n

With a jam-packed launch schedule in 2021, it\u2019s likely that the Eastern Range will soon again be asked to accommodate two missions on the same day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve said a dozen times over the last eight to nine months that we could do two within less than 24 hours, and everybody \u2026 is excited,\u201d Shoemaker said in an interview Spaceflight Now this week. \u201cThen when either the weather or some other factor says no, we\u2019re not going to do it this time, there\u2019s kind of a little bit of a letdown because everybody wants to see it happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to see it happen because, frankly, how exciting would that be to see two rockets go off within a real short period of time from the Eastern Range,\u201d Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

In August 2019, a Falcon 9 and an Atlas 5 rocket from United Launch Alliance took off from neighboring pads at Cape Canaveral in a period of less than 35 hours. That was the shortest span between two orbital missions at Cape Canaveral since May 1981.<\/p>\n

There were two launches separated by less than 10 hours in 1967, and an Atlas-Agena launch vehicle took off from Cape Canaveral just an hour and 39 minutes before the launch of the two-man Gemini 12 crew on a Titan rocket in November 1966. The Gemini 12 crew docked with the Agena upper stage in orbit.<\/p>\n

Launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center supported 31 rocket flights last year, and there are more than 50 missions scheduled in 2021, according to the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the unit commanded by Shoemaker and manages all Eastern Range launch operations on the Space Coast.<\/p>\n

The faster launch tempo at Cape Canaveral is driven by SpaceX, which flew 25 of the 31 rocket launches from the Space Coast last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve kind of seen the evolution from when SpaceX first got here, and if we did eight to ten launches a year, we were having a pretty hopping year,\u201d Shoemaker said. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re looking at upwards of the lower 50s on the calendar for the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

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File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: SpaceX<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shoemaker said range officials have approved two launches to occur within a 24-hour period a dozen times in recent months.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy that didn\u2019t actually happen, whether it was a weather issue that caused a delay, or it was something on the launch provider side that caused a delay, those are things outside of our control,\u201d he said. \u201cProbably a decade ago, we would have said no way, but we\u2019ve really scrubbed the way we do business and focused on how we provide that support to whoever is on the range.\u201d<\/p>\n

Military officials have met with SpaceX and ULA, the two major launch contractors flying from the Space Coast, and newcomers like Blue Origin to learn what the commercial rocket companies need from the range.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that has helped us get better is the customer base coming in and saying I need you to do more, or I need you to do more, and I need you to do it faster,\u201d Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that we couldn\u2019t have done it a decade ago,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s that the demand wasn\u2019t there. The forcing function wasn\u2019t there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Military units at Eastern Range provide safety and security services, manage infrastructure, provide weather forecasting support, and help ensure airspace and downrange waters are clear before launch. The emphasis is on agility and responsiveness to user needs, Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they want to launch, we want to schedule the launch so they can do it. Whether they ask us six months in advance or they ask us a week in advance, we want to get to yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bad weather and technical factors still get in the way of rocket launches, and Shoemaker said the range approved nearly 200 launch opportunities last year, resulting in the 31 successful flights by SpaceX and ULA.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we got to yes 200 times, which is critical,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d say almost every single time somebody asked us to launch we said yep, you can do it. Then a dozen times, we said, yeah, you can do it, and the other customer can do it, and we can do it within 24 hours or less.\u201d<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets fly with autonomous self-destruct mechanisms, reducing the range workforce needed to support a launch. ULA\u2019s Atlas and Delta rockets still use human-in-the-loop flight termination systems, which require a range safety officer to track the launcher\u2019s trajectory and send a manual destruct command if a major problem occurs in flight.<\/p>\n

According to Shoemaker, the autonomous destruct systems \u201callows us a lot more flexibility to move schedules around, and to support activities much more closely spaced.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe long term vision is to get to automation of things,\u201d Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

The Space Force wants all space launchers flying from military ranges to have autonomous self-destruct capability by 2025.<\/p>\n

The advent of autonomous flight termination systems allows the range to eliminate radar trackers. And the two-way communications links for the manual destruct signal are not required for rockets flying with automated safety mechanisms, such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon launcher family.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you don\u2019t need to call up as much equipment, that\u2019s less time you have to spend configuring that equipment to make sure that it\u2019s ready between one mission to another, so it just provides a significant amount of flexibility,\u201d Shoemaker said. \u201cThat has really been fundamental to us being able to say yes all those times we did over the last the last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1990s and 2000s, range officials said they typically needed about 48 hours to reconfigure infrastructure and equipment from one launch to the next.<\/p>\n

\"\"
File photo of an Atlas 5 launch. Credit: United Launch Alliance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gen. Doug Schiess, the former commander of the 45th Space Wing, said last year that the Eastern Range needs about 300 people to support a ULA launch with a manual flight termination system. For a SpaceX mission, with an automated safety system, that number is reduced to about 200,.<\/p>\n

Shoemaker said the 45th Space Wing has conducted exercises of the range team to practice how they might support two SpaceX missions in a span of a few hours, or ULA and SpaceX launches on the same day. He declined to say how close in time the Eastern Range might theoretically be able to support two launches.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to pin it down and say we can do (two launches) within an hour, or we could do three within 24 hours,\u201d Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conditions have to be right,\u201d he said. \u201cWe could end up in another scenario where they ask us two months from now to do two (launches) within less than five hours, but some external factor that that we don\u2019t necessarily control may drive us to not be able to just say yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

National security missions and some NASA launches with limited interplanetary launch windows get priority on the Eastern Range.<\/p>\n

The military exercises conducted by the 45th Space Wing have helped identify areas where the range can modify procedures and update processes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exercise is to kind of run to countdowns of two dissimilar launch vehicles with two range crews and understand what do we need to improve upon as far as the training and the way that we execute our parts of the mission, and do deconfliction in between,\u201d Shoemaker said.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Updated Feb. 5 with additional launch delay. A Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early Thursday, while another Falcon 9 stands in the foreground on pad 39A for liftoff this weekend. Credit: SpaceX One of the two Falcon 9 rockets SpaceX planned to take off in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1855,771,1736,845,479,428,25,1702],"class_list":["post-11880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-45th-space-wing","tag-cape-canaveral-space-force-station","tag-complex-40","tag-eastern-range","tag-falcon-9","tag-kennedy-space-center","tag-launch","tag-launch-pad-39a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11880"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}