{"id":46038,"date":"2023-07-30T01:41:29","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T17:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/spacexs-falcon-heavy-launches-worlds-most-massive-communications-satellite-updated\/"},"modified":"2023-07-30T01:41:29","modified_gmt":"2023-07-29T17:41:29","slug":"spacexs-falcon-heavy-launches-worlds-most-massive-communications-satellite-updated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/spacexs-falcon-heavy-launches-worlds-most-massive-communications-satellite-updated\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy launches world\u2019s most massive communications satellite [Updated]"},"content":{"rendered":"

2:45 a.m. EDT Saturday update: <\/strong>SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy has successfully launched the Jupiter 3 communications satellite.<\/p>\n

5:30 p.m. EDT Thursday update: <\/strong>The launch of SpaceX\u2019s next Falcon Heavy rocket has been pushed back again until Friday night, following a scrub Wednesday night with about a minute left in the countdown.<\/p>\n

12:30 a.m. EDT Thursday update: <\/strong>SpaceX has scrubbed the Falcon Heavy rocket\u2019s first launch attempt and will try again Thursday night.<\/p>\n

The heaviest commercial communications satellite ever built lifted off on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Friday night from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.<\/p>\n

This satellite, owned by EchoStar and built by Maxar, tipped the scales at about 9.2 metric tons, or more than 20,000 pounds. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy propelled the spacecraft on its way toward an operating position in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.<\/p>\n

SpaceX scrubbed the launch attempt Wednesday night with about a minute left in the countdown due to a stuck valve on one of the Falcon Heavy\u2019s first stage boosters. Teams in Florida swapped out the valve, but decided to forego a launch opportunity Thursday night and target Friday night for the next launch attempt.<\/p>\n

The action began at 11:04 p.m. EDT (03:04 UTC) with the ignition of the Falcon Heavy\u2019s 27 main engines on Launch Complex 39A. A few moments later, the Falcon Heavy climbed away from its launch pad and headed downrange toward the east from the Kennedy Space Center, darting through a thin cloud layer on the way to space.<\/p>\n

EchoStar\u2019s subsidiary Hughes Network Systems will put the satellite, named Jupiter 3, into service to provide Internet across the Americas, from Canada to Argentina.<\/p>\n

Jupiter 3 takes the crown as the heavyweight champion of commercial communications satellites. It\u2019s at least a couple of tons heavier than any satellite of its kind that has launched before. The spacecraft is also the most massive payload ever lofted by a Falcon Heavy, still the world\u2019s most powerful commercial launch vehicle in operational service.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is large,\u201d said Mark Wymer, a senior vice president at Hughes Network Systems. \u201cThe satellite from tip to tip is about 10 stories, so it\u2019s a monster. It\u2019s weighing in right around 9 (metric) tons, which is why we need the SpaceX Falcon Heavy to get it up into space. What drives a lot of the size and scale of that is we know that there\u2019s this huge hunger for data, and we knew that we had to put a good bit of bandwidth up in the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Friday night.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Stephen Clark\/Ars Technica<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The Jupiter 3 satellite, sometimes called EchoStar 24, will provide up to 500 gigabits per second of total capacity, beaming Internet signals to rural homes, businesses, airplane passengers, and government and military users.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about what it takes to support a 500-gigabit throughput satellite, in terms of the power and the solar arrays, and so forth, that\u2019s what drives its size, scale, and scope,\u201d Wymer told Ars in an interview before the launch.<\/p>\n

These are the kinds of missions that suit SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy. Such a heavy satellite could not launch into the same orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket, even if SpaceX expended the first stage. The Falcon Heavy combines three Falcon 9 boosters together to triple the rocket\u2019s power at liftoff.<\/p>\n

On Friday night\u2019s mission, SpaceX returned the two side boosters to landings back at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, a few miles south of the Falcon Heavy\u2019s launch pad. The center core booster burned through all its liquid propellant to give its payload as much speed as possible before shutting off and re-entering the atmosphere to crash into the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Falcon Heavy\u2019s two side boosters return to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Stephen Clark\/Ars Technica<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The twin side boosters, both reused from previous missions, detached from the core stage around two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. Those boosters flipped around to fly tail-first, then reignited their engines to reverse course and head back toward the Florida coast. Descending vertically, the side boosters returned to their landing zones just shy of eight minutes into the mission, accompanied by the sharp clap of sonic booms.<\/p>\n

The unique choreography of a Falcon Heavy launch\u2014with three rockets in controlled flight simultaneously\u2014is becoming a familiar sight on Florida\u2019s Space Coast. This was SpaceX\u2019s seventh Falcon Heavy launch and the third of five planned this year. It was SpaceX\u2019s 51st Falcon rocket launch in 2023\u2014or 52nd launch if you count the test flight of the Starship mega-rocket from Texas in April.<\/p>\n

Heavy lifting<\/h2>\n

After the Falcon Heavy\u2019s three boosters completed their work, the rocket\u2019s upper stage fired its engine three times over the course of more than three hours to place the Jupiter 3 satellite into an elliptical, or oval-shaped, transfer orbit. The final burn of the upper stage raised the perigee, or low point, of the orbit, shortening the time needed for Jupiter 3 to use its own propulsion to maneuver into its final operational orbit.<\/p>\n

The rocket deployed the Jupiter 3 satellite early Saturday, about three-and-a-half hours after takeoff. After separating from the rocket, Jupiter 3 will extend its solar panels and antennas. A series of burns with an onboard engine will move the satellite into a circular geostationary orbit, where its velocity will match the Earth\u2019s rotation. Then Jupiter 3 will settle into a parking slot along the equator at 95 degrees west longitude, replacing an obsolete 16-year-old satellite in EchoStar\u2019s fleet.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

By the end of the year, Jupiter 3 should be in commercial service. It will work alongside two other satellites in the Hughes fleet, together providing more than a terabit of capacity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith each one of our satellites that we brought to market\u2026 we\u2019ve seen our speeds increase from 5 megabits per second to 25 megabits per second and now, with this one, we\u2019ll deliver 100 megabits per second,\u201d Wymer said.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Jupiter 3 satellite in launch configuration.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Hughes Network Systems<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Hughes Network Systems competes with several other satellite-based Internet networks, including SpaceX\u2019s Starlink constellation. Starlink satellites fly much closer to Earth than geostationary satellites like Jupiter 3, reducing the latency of Internet signals routed to consumers on the ground. But a geostationary network only needs a few satellites to provide Internet connectivity, whereas SpaceX is launching thousands of Starlink platforms.<\/p>\n

The Starlink network and Hughes Network Systems have comparable customer numbers\u2014both claim more than 1.5 million subscribers\u2014but Hughes had a years-long head start over SpaceX.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first time SpaceX has launched a competitor\u2019s payload in the broadband-from-space market. SpaceX has launched satellites for OneWeb\u2019s Internet network, and in May, a Falcon Heavy rocket launched a large geostationary broadband satellite for Viasat that is similar in architecture to Jupiter 3.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe market is large and vast, and I think there\u2019s lots of shared opportunity there for all of us,\u201d Wymer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of our services are designed, really, for the underserved and the unserved,\u201d Wymer said. \u201cThese are typically the rural and low-density areas. With Jupiter 3 and the additional capacity that it\u2019s bringing on, with roughly 300 spot beams, we\u2019re able to really concentrate more capacity and more throughput into those given markets and areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wymer said the Jupiter 3 satellite uses a different antenna design than Viasat\u2019s satellite, which could be declared a total loss after its mesh reflector ran into problems during a post-launch deployment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really confident that we won\u2019t have any issues in that regard,\u201d Wymer said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2:45 a.m. EDT Saturday update: SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy has successfully launched the Jupiter 3 communications satellite. 5:30 p.m. EDT Thursday update: The launch of SpaceX\u2019s next Falcon Heavy rocket has been pushed back again until Friday night, following a scrub Wednesday night with about a minute left in the countdown. 12:30 a.m. EDT Thursday update: SpaceX has scrubbed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46040,"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":[252,291,3156,678,3496,9594,9790,1084,316],"class_list":["post-46038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-broadband","tag-commercial-space","tag-echostar","tag-falcon-heavy","tag-hughesnet","tag-internet-2","tag-jupiter-3","tag-maxar","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46038"}],"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=46038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}