The focus of the week ahead is dominated, of course, by the much anticipated third test flight of Starship.
Once speculated to potentially fly as early as late February, the weeks leading up to flight have seen notably fewer stacks of the ship and booster than were seen during the second flight test campaign. Besides testing already beginning on hardware for flight four, there have been some interesting, and sometimes peculiar, events as these vehicles prepare for flight.
This flight aside, Japanese company Space One is expected to re-attempt the maiden flight of its KAIROS launcher which scrubbed during its first launch attempt last week. This launch is currently anticipated no earlier than Wednesday.
There is one scheduled Falcon 9 launch of more Starlink satellites with the Group 6-44 mission out of the Cape, and Rocket Lab launched the latest in a series of StriX Earth observation satellites for Synspective on its Electron rocket — the first to join this constellation since late 2022.
Electron/Curie | Owl Night Long
Rocket Lab’s third launch of the year was for its customer Synspective during a short window lasting a little over an hour. Launch happened on March 12 at 15:03 UTC, from Launch Complex 1B at the Mahia Peninsula, in New Zealand.
This StriX-3 Earth observation satellite joined an existing constellation in a Sun-synchronous orbit that uses Synthetic Aperture Radar to transmit microwave pulses toward the Earth’s surface and interpret the signals reflected to create an image of the target area.
Integration of the wide-bodied StriX-3 satellite into the fairing. (Credit: Rocket Lab)
This series of satellites has a ground resolution of between one and three meters and a swatch width of between 10 and 30 kilometers. The wide-bodied size of this satellite utilized Electron’s expanded fairing option and was further shielded from radiation exposure before deployment at T+53 minutes, thanks to a maneuver by the kick stage which will ignite three minutes earlier.
This was the fourth launch in this series, which began with “The Owl’s Night Begins” mission in 2020 and has since been followed by “The Owl’s Night Continues” and “The Owl Spreads its Wings,” both in 2022.
The Japanese commercial company known as Space One is scheduled to make its debut in the world of orbital space launch with its new KAIROS small satellite launcher. KAIROS is scheduled to fly from Space Port Kii, which is a new, dedicated, launch facility built between 2019 to 2021 that is also making its debut.
The KAIROS launch was scheduled for Saturday, March 9 from the Space One Launch Pad at Space Port Kii, which is on the coast south of Osaka on the main island of Honshu. However, the countdown was aborted at T0 and the first stage was not ignited. The countdown was restarted at X-14 minutes for another try, but that resulted in another abort at the revised T0. The launch was then scrubbed for the day and will be attempted again on March 13, once again at 11:01 AM JST (02:01 UTC)
Space One’s KAIROS stands on the pad at Spaceport Kii during the first launch attempt. (Credit: Space One)
KAIROS is flying a prototype quick response satellite for the Japanese Government Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center, which operates Japan’s IGS satellites and is roughly the equivalent of the US National Reconnaissance Office.
KAIROS is a four-stage launcher, 18 meters high, with three solid-fueled rocket stages and a fourth liquid-fueled upper stage to make the final push into orbit. The rocket, just under one and a half meters wide and massing 23 metric tons, is capable of flying a 250-kilogram payload to a low-Earth orbit inclined 33 degrees to the Equator, or a 150-kilogram payload into a sun-synchronous polar orbit.
The rocket is of a similar size and width to the Rocket Lab Electron. It is roughly similar in capability to the original version of Electron before its 2020 upgrade in payload capacity. Similarly to Rocket Lab’s Mahia launch site, Space Port Kii is a dedicated launch site for Space One. The company aims to launch frequently and have the world’s shortest time between contract and launch, to try to lower the cost of access to space. Space One is joining a fairly crowded field of small satellite launch operators.
Chang Zheng 2C | Unknown Payload
Based on NOTAMs, there is a third planned flight of the Chang Zheng 2C from launch pad LC-3 at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in China no earlier than March 13. At this time details of the payload are unavailable.
Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-44
Another batch of Starlink v2 Mini satellites is bound for the Group 6 shell orbiting at 559 kilometers, inclined by 43 degrees. This flight will launch no earlier than March 13 from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
The booster for this mission has not yet been declared but is likely to be either B1080-6 or B1062-19. It is expected to land on an autonomous drone ship, located further downrange approximately eight minutes after lift-off. As has been seen on the last few missions for this shell, it is expected that the Raptor vacuum engine will no longer carry a stiffener ring.
The Starlink team has been focused on improving network performance with the goal of < 20ms latency.
Over the past month, we have meaningfully reduced median and worst-case latency for users around the world → https://t.co/0hmywDdTMN pic.twitter.com/tI5wPNFfsT
— Starlink (@Starlink) March 8, 2024
It is also unclear if this mission will include another 24 satellites — the highest number launched to date on the Group 6-39 mission which also set a Falcon 9 record of the highest payload mass carried to useful orbit of 17,500 kilograms. The two subsequent Group 6 missions continued to carry 23 but the company aims to increase this to 28 Starlink satellites in single trips by the end of the year.
This will be the fourth Falcon 9 mission of the month, following nine in February and a record ten flights in January. Recent launches have included several non-Starlink missions with more complex logistics, and some delays due to challenging weather conditions. These have collectively impacted the cadence that SpaceX initially hit the ground running with at the start of the year. If the company maintains the current pace it could finish the year having achieved between 110 and 120 Falcon 9 launches.
The third integrated flight test of Starship is currently scheduled for no earlier than March 14 during a two-hour window that begins at 7:00 AM CDT (12:00 UTC). The required regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the form of a launch license is expected to be released as close as the day prior.
Pending regulatory approval, all signs are good for a launch in the coming days following a Raptor vacuum engine swap-out and subsequent spin prime test, the closure of the mishap investigation, and a successful WDR on March 3.
Ship 28 and Booster 10 are now at the stage where the automated flight termination system is installed and hardware armed and in what will hopefully be the final stacking for launch. Meanwhile, SpaceX has issued a revised flight plan with some additional tests that will be conducted for the first time on this flight.
Starship completed its rehearsal for launch, loading more than 10 million pounds of propellant on Starship and Super Heavy and taking the flight-like countdown to T-10 seconds pic.twitter.com/1px7nyzhqQ
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 4, 2024
Ship 28 will be the first to fly with the electric, rather than hydraulic, thrust vector control, amongst several improvements made to both the ship and booster since the previous test flight. Booster 10 now has a flatter, more bowl-shaped elliptical common dome, while Ship 28 has some structural improvements, some vent position changes, and a working payload door.
While excitement will once again be guaranteed, a successful mission will not be implied by the ship making it to Hawaii this time, following some changes to the flight plan. If Ship 28 achieves its full intended journey, it will instead make a hard landing in the Indian Ocean — a change in trajectory that allows for some additional tests during flight.
Close-up on the engine bay of Ship 28 during stacking operations. (Credit: BocaChicaGal for NSF)
As before, hot staging is planned inside the first three minutes of flight and this mission will additionally see a test opening and closing of the payload door just before T+12 minutes. This will be followed by a demonstration of internal propellant transfer during Ship 28’s coast phase at around T+24 minutes. This transfer test is important to keep Starship on track for its part in the forthcoming Artemis missions, despite NASA recently announcing delays to the timeline for the program and pushing dates back by a year.
10,000 kilograms of liquid oxygen is expected to be transferred between the header and main tank to achieve a “Tipping Point” milestone in what will be the largest transfer to date of cryogenic propellant in space. Propellant transfers will be a recurring theme in future flight demonstrations, for which SpaceX has requested the FAA extend the limit of five launches per year to allow for at least nine in 2024.
All going well, Ship 28 will then demonstrate the first relighting of Raptor engines in space within the first hour of its journey, and will then begin a controlled re-entry eight minutes later at around T+49 minutes.
The revised timeline expects a hard, destructive, splashdown landing in the Indian Ocean just over an hour after launch at around T+64 minutes. This revised location allows the additional demonstrations, in particular the in-space engine burns and the subsequent entry trajectory, to be conducted safely.
Close-up of the Starship stack as tests were conducted with the quick disconnect arm. (Credit: Sean Doherty for NSF)
(Lead image: Dawn breaks over Starbase. Credit: BocaChicaGal for NSF)
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
