A handful of days after a pair of Falcon 9 rockets launched 106 Starlink satellites in lower than 23 hours, SpaceX has already raised one other Falcon 9 rocket vertical for one more Starlink mission – set to be the fourth this month.
That mission – Starlink 4-18 – will see SpaceX launch one other batch of 53 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) from NASA’s Kennedy House Middle LC-39A pad, which supported a distinct Starlink launch (4-17) simply 11 days prior. Climate for the 6:20 am EDT (10:20 UTC) Wednesday launch is anticipated to be 80% favorable, boding properly for an on-time liftoff.
SpaceX says that former Falcon Heavy aspect booster B1052 – transformed right into a Falcon 9 booster in late 2021 – will launch for the fifth time in assist of Starlink 4-18. In an fascinating twist and demonstration of SpaceX’s confidence each in that conversion course of and in Falcon booster restoration, Subsequent Spaceflight just lately reported that B1052 will likely be transformed again to a Falcon Heavy aspect booster and can be part of fellow aspect booster B1053 – unused since June 2019 – to launch a big industrial geostationary satellite tv for pc often called ViaSat-3 Americas as early as September 2022.
As is now routine, Starlink 4-18’s Falcon fairing will possible even be flight-proven. Solely Falcon 9’s expendable higher stage, just a few Starlink payload adapter parts, and the Starlink satellites themselves will likely be new, which has allowed SpaceX to realize unprecedented affordability and marginal launch prices as little as $15 million. Even together with a conservative price estimate of $500k to $1M per Starlink V1.5 satellite tv for pc, your entire marginal price of a contemporary Starlink launch is probably going lower than $30-45 million, whereas rivals like OneWeb have possible paid greater than $50 million only for launch companies.
Amazon’s ‘Mission Kuiper’ Starlink competitor is even worse off after drafting an unprecedented sequence of multibillion-dollar contracts that can possible be certain that launch companies alone price at the least $100-125 million per mission.
Starlink 4-18 will likely be SpaceX’s forty sixth devoted launch of operational Starlink satellites and can elevate the entire variety of working Starlink satellites in orbit to round 2370 if all goes properly. Tune in beneath round 6:10 am EDT (10:10 UTC) to look at the launch reside.