At 3: 31pm EST, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which was the company’s 20th launch this year and the eighth flight of the rocket’s first booster. This booster will return to Earth in about 10 minutes at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1, a concrete base that has not been used for rocket landing since last December. Falcon 9 booster usually lands on unmanned spacecraft at sea.
At the same time, 88 satellites were pushed into sun-synchronous, pole-to-pole Earth orbit by the second booster of Falcon 9. Thirty-six microsatellites were installed on a new payload adapter, which was made by Spaceflight, which reserved space for small satellites on the rocket and other satellites arranged by SpaceX.
This is the second task of SpaceX’s cost-cutting Small Satellite Rides Program, which provides small satellite launches with a starting price of $1 million. The low-cost launch service in the aerospace industry has revived the market for small-sized satellites, which have long been forced to take bigger missions. SpaceX’s mosaic project takes advantage of the growing small satellite market, where the company can provide services ranging from communication to earth observation.
The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency (SDA) installed five satellites on Transporter 2 to test laser communication with each other in space, and an independent experiment aimed at testing space data processing (a method that does not require time-consuming ground terminals). These two tests support the goal that the organization can finally communicate with ships and weapon systems at a faster speed than ever before. SDA plans to launch two batches of satellite networks in the next few years.
Others include a group of satellites from geospatial analysis company HawkEye 360, which will collect radio frequency data, and another group of satellites from radio frequency reconnaissance company Kleos, which will "detect and locate maritime radio frequency transmission" for commercial and government customers. Two nanosatellites of satellite company Tyvak are also on the launch mission, but the company refused to disclose which institution the satellites will be used by. Tyvak provides space optics and remote sensing services for the government.
The "Transporter 2" mission has brought the total number of satellites launched by SpaceX since the end of January to nearly 900, almost twice the total number of satellites launched worldwide before 2020. The vast majority of these satellites are provided for SpaceX’s Starlink space Internet network, which will continue to grow throughout the year.
SpaceX attempted to launch Transporter 2 for the first time on Tuesday, but the countdown stopped 11 seconds before the launch and was postponed until Wednesday, because a private helicopter suddenly broke into the airspace closed by the Federal Aviation Administration for this mission. On Twitter, Musk called the pilot no-fly zone of the Federal Aviation Administration "unreasonably huge" and criticized the agency’s supervision for "violation of regulations". He also said that other space companies and lawmakers have long been dissatisfied. They think that the airspace rules of the Federal Aviation Administration are outdated and inefficient.
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