11/5/2023 0 Comments Falcon 9 misses landing![]() ![]() Successful completion of this milestone would clear an important hurdle for subsequent GTO missions. It is understood that the OG-2 ascent will only require one “burn” of the Falcon 9’s second stage, thus enabling SpaceX to perform a restart test of its Merlin 1D+ Vacuum engine without impacting the requirements of the payload. Initial suggestions that the SES-9 communications satellite-destined for insertion into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO)-might ride aboard the RTF mission ultimately proved not to be the case and 11 small OG-2 satellites, destined for a lower-performance injection into low-Earth orbit were instead selected as the primary payload. Moreover, today’s mission represented the maiden voyage of the “Upgraded Falcon 9” booster and its first-stage hardware touched down for the first time on solid ground, alighting on Landing Complex (LC)-1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. As Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield commented in the moments after the feat, today’s event “opens a brand new door to space travel.” Photo credit: Mike Killian / AmericaSpaceĪs outlined in a recent AmericaSpace article, the processing campaign to reach this point has been a long one, with SpaceX having announced in September that it anticipated a Return to Flight (RTF) date no sooner than the mid-November timeframe, before eventually slipping until the end of the year. And in spite of recovering from a loss of vehicle incident, SpaceX actually closes out the most troubled 12 months in its history by delivering to orbit its largest number of satellites on a single mission and equaling its own record, set in 2014, for having launched as many as six successful flights within the span of a single calendar year. EST on Monday, 21 December, after six agonizing months, and a 24-hour postponement from Sunday night, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based launch services provider returned to flight, delivering 11 Orbcomm Generation-2 (OG-2) satellites into low-Earth orbit and opening the doors to a busy 2016. ![]() Never again could SpaceX claim a 100-percent record for the Falcon 9 having delivered each of its primary payloads successfully to orbit. A gradually burgeoning chain of 18 straight launch successes since June 2010 was abruptly broken and the Falcon 9 v1.1 which might have delivered the seventh dedicated Dragon cargo ship toward the International Space Station (ISS) was snuffed out in the rarefied high atmosphere. Having suffered the catastrophic loss of a Falcon 9 v1.1 booster during first-stage flight on 28 June-which doomed NASA’s first International Docking Adapter (IDA) and vaporized a critical piece of hardware in support of the agency’s Commercial Crew ambitions-it might be supposed that 2015 has been the worst year in SpaceX’s history. History was made on 21 December 2015, as SpaceX brought the first stage of its Upgraded Falcon 9 back from the edge of space and guided it to a precision landing on solid ground.
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