Month: July 2021

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  Liftoff! SpaceX and the 45th Space Launch Delta find a hole in the weather to get the Transporter-2 mission off the ground. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

SpaceX launched its 20th Falcon 9 rocket of the year on Wednesday, and the booster lofting the Transporter-2 mission completed yet another successful flight to orbit.

This launch continues to cement the progress SpaceX has made toward the viable reuse of rocket first stages. This rocket core, named B1060, for booster number 1060, had previously flown into space seven times. Its first launch was a GPS III satellite mission for the US Space Force on June 30, 2020. With Wednesday's flight, the rocket has now flown eight missions in a calendar year.

That is a rate of one mission every 1.5 months. However, since early January, this same rocket has flown five missions, so it is approaching a rapid cadence of one launch per month. This is unprecedented for the Falcon 9 rocket or any other orbital spacecraft in history. Each of NASA's space shuttle orbiters, for example, typically only flew one to two times per year, needing significant refurbishment between each flight.

Enlarge / Cosmic Girl takes off with the LauncherOne vehicle on Wednesday. (credit: Virgin Orbit)

Virgin Orbit demonstrated on Wednesday morning that its first spaceflight in January was no fluke.

The company's Cosmic Girl aircraft took off from Mojave Air and Space Port about an hour after sunrise Wednesday and flew about 200 km off the California coast, southwest of Los Angeles. The 747 carrier aircraft then dropped the LauncherOne rocket, which proceeded to ignite, reorient itself upward, and blast into orbit. Eventually, the rocket deployed seven small satellites into an orbit about 500 km above the planet.

This was Virgin Orbit's third launch in about 13 months. The rocket's first test flight failed in late May 2020, several seconds after ignition, due to a break in a liquid-oxygen line. But the second test flight this past January was successful, resulting in the deployment of 10 CubeSats for NASA. Now, the rocket has succeeded again. Suddenly, Virgin Orbit finds itself with a viable rocket.