Launch Roundup – Starship ready for fourth flight, Starliner rescheduled for third attempt, Virgin Galactic to fly VSS Unity for last time

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There are now two high-profile missions scheduled in the coming week after a challenging weekend that saw the scrub of another attempt to launch the first crewed Starliner and the announcement that the dearMoon project is canceled. In more positive news, it also confirmed that Chang’e 6 became the first vehicle to land on the moon’s far side.

Starship was set to be the main attraction on this week’s docket and is currently scheduled for launch on Thursday, June 6. The stack is set to fly after two wet dress rehearsals and one final destacking to arm the flight termination system ahead of the weekend. The primary goal is for the ship to survive re-entry, after which it is hoped to perform the first “flip and burn” landing maneuver since prototype SN15’s successful propulsive landing a little over three years ago.

The crewed flight test of the Starliner vehicle is now rescheduled to no earlier than June 5, allowing teams to assess the ground support equipment (GSE) issue that prevented Saturday’s launch, with another opportunity the following day. Before either of these significant test flights, the Chang’e 6 ascender craft is expected to launch from the lunar surface on Tuesday, June 4. It will have spent approximately two days collecting around 2kg of samples from the southern edge of the Apollo basin to return to Earth – the first time in history that samples have been collected from the far side.

Also scheduled this week is the final commercial launch of VSS Unity on the suborbital Galactic 07 mission before Virgin Galactic moves its attention to the new Delta class vehicle which will supersede it. Suborbital competitor Blue Origin finally returned to crewed flights of its New Shepard vehicle late last month for the first time in 18 months, however, this will be the last commercial crewed flight for Virgin Galactic until sometime in 2026. This launch is currently set no earlier than Saturday, June 8.

SpaceX also has three scheduled Starlink missions this week, two of which are due to launch from each coast within a five-hour period that also includes Rocket Lab’s delayed PREFIRE and Ice mission for NASA. This busy window begins in the evening of Tuesday, June 4 local time while, for those in Europe, all three launches will occur the next day.

Last month, the 6,500th Starlink satellite launched on the Group 6-63 mission. This launch was just 15 minutes off the exact time of the 5th anniversary of the first Starlink batch of 60 test satellites being launched in 2019. Starlink announced last week that it has crossed the three million customer mark, bringing it even closer to economic success — this equates to around 150,000 new customers per month and rising. Last week marked a year since the last Starlink Group 2 mission which formed part of the first generation of shells in the constellation, while next month will mark one year already since the last of the Group 5 missions which began to build the initial shell of the second generation.

SpaceX reached yet another cadence milestone last month with a record 14 Falcon launches achieved with the Starlink Group 6-54 mission on May 31. Booster B1062 also made a record 21st flight last month. Its sibling B1061 is currently awaiting an assignment to repeat that feat while B1067 is one flight behind it and is currently being refurbished.

Even with the droneship Just Read The Instructions back in operation after a week or so in dock undergoing maintenance, the company is less likely to repeat the same number of launches this month. Historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) is currently undergoing reconfiguration ahead of the Falcon Heavy GOES-U mission currently slated for June 25 and was used only twice in May. Late last month this pad exceeded the total number of Shuttle launches it has supported (82) with Falcon vehicles which now total 83 and counting, including all nine Falcon Heavy missions to date.

In the future, it’s possible that SLC-6 in Vandenberg once used regularly for Delta IV Heavy missions, could see launches of this heavy-lift vehicle for certain missions, such as those for the National Reconnaissance Office. Space Launch Delta 30 confirmed the lease to SpaceX a little over a year ago, as part of the first round of launch pad allocations. The pad is currently being reconfigured and expected to come back online next year.

Overall, 2024 through May saw 109 orbital launches, with SpaceX accounting for 52% of them, the US and China leading the field with 59% and 24% of launches worldwide respectively.

Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 8-5

This will be the first Group 8 mission to launch from the Cape, with the three prior missions in this shell having left pad 4E at Vandenberg on the opposite coast. Lift-off is scheduled at 8:04 PM EDT on Tuesday, June 4 (00:04 UTC on June 5) from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base at the start of a shorter-than-usual window lasting three and a half hours. The number of Starlink satellites onboard has yet to be confirmed and is likely to include a proportion of the newer direct-to-cell variant. The booster has not yet been assigned but is expected to land approximately 600km further downrange on the autonomous droneship Just Read the Instructions.

This will be the 173rd Starlink mission which have built in cadence to three times within the same week at the end of May, during which the 6,500th satellite was deployed.

As of the start of this week, there have now been 6528 Starlink satellites launched, of which 450 have re-entered and 5234 have moved into their operational orbits. SpaceX is in the process of retiring and deorbiting around 122 older Starlink satellites, which typically have a five-year lifespan. The company has also filed an application for a shell at a lower altitude of around 340km whereas current shells operate from nearer 550km. These satellites would have a shorter lifespan as they are more vulnerable to atmospheric drag but would be expected to deliver services with an even shorter latency.

Electron is icy with liquid oxygen on the previous launch attempt for the PREFIRE mission. (Credit: Rocket Lab)

Electron | PREFIRE and Ice

Rocket Lab is preparing for a second attempt to launch the “PREFIRE and Ice” mission – the second in a pair of cubesat missions for NASA heading once again into a sun-synchronous orbit. The previous attempt was scrubbed on Saturday due to an out-of-family sensor reading. Lift-off is now scheduled for Wednesday, June 5 at 03:00 UTC from pad LC-1B at the company’s spaceport in Mahia, New Zealand.

The two PREFIRE 6U CubeSats will study the radiant energy emitted by Earth’s polar regions in far-infrared wavelengths. It is hoped that these measurements will improve climate models and predictions for future changes and impacts on humanity and ecosystems; nearly 60 percent of the Arctic’s heat emissions are at wavelengths that have never been systematically studied. The pair of satellites will pass over a given spot on Earth within hours of each other, enabling the teams to potentially catch some previously elusive shorter-time-scale phenomena.

This will be the seventh Electron launch this year and the 49th overall launch for the vehicle since it became operational in 2017. Rocket Lab is on pace to fly double-digit missions this year and has said that it hopes to fly up to 22 Electron missions in 2024. This would place the company second behind SpaceX for flight cadence by private launch companies.

Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 8-8

A second Starlink mission is expected to launch around five hours after Group 8-5, and around seven hours before Starship is scheduled to launch. This mission is launching another batch of Starlink v2-Mini satellites into the Group 8 shell at 535km, inclined by 53 degrees. The payload is likely to contain 13 of the Direct-to-Cell variants, which has not yet been confirmed.

Lift-off is scheduled for 10:12 PM PDT on Tuesday, June 4 (05:12 UTC on June 5) from pad SLC-4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base, with a four-and-a-half-hour launch window. The booster has yet to be allocated to this flight but is expected to land on the autonomous droneship Of Course I Still Love You which will be waiting approximately 600km further downrange.

Atlas V N22 | Starliner CFT

Starliner was expected to send astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on their way to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, just days after SpaceX celebrated four years since its inaugural crewed flight in 2019. The DEMO-2 mission ushered in a new era of commercial crew missions and SpaceX have since flown 50 crew members aboard its Dragon spacecraft across 13 missions. Eight of these were operational crew missions to the ISS under the Commercial Crew Program contract which was awarded to both SpaceX and Boeing ten years ago.

This crewed flight test will provide NASA with the redundancy it sought back in 2014 by awarding the contract for the transportation of crew to and from the orbiting outpost to two separate providers. Once completed, the mission will certify the Starliner vehicle for the regular crew rotation missions to the ISS. NASA will drop to one Crew Dragon launch per year and alternate crew rotations between the two vehicles, although SpaceX will also be flying Dragon for additional private missions such as Axiom-4 and Polaris Dawn.

The teams at NASA, Boeing, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) decided to forego another attempt on Sunday to give the team further time to assess the ground support issue that prevented Saturday’s launch, less than four minutes before lift-off. A valve issue had disabled the topping up of the Centaur upper stage’s cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks during the lead-up to launch. This was eventually resolved after first checking a solution to switch to a backup circuit through the Software Integration Lab (SIL) test environment. Ultimately, the launch was scrubbed when the ground launch sequencer failed to load and verify the correct configuration as the Atlas V vehicle proceeded into terminal count. ULA reported this work was completed on Monday.

Starliner atop an Atlas V N22 sits on the pad at SLC-41 after the scrub on Saturday, June 1.  (Credit: NASA / Joel Kowsky)

The launch is now expected to take place no earlier than Wednesday, June 5 – almost a month since the original May 6 attempt which was also scrubbed due to a problem with a liquid oxygen relief valve on the Centaur upper stage. The 52-meter-tall stack remains, for now, on the pad at SLC-41. The N22 configuration of the Atlas V has no fairings, two side boosters, and two RL-10A engines on the Centaur upper stage. Starliner will separate around 15 minutes after launch, following the jettison of the nosecone “ascent cover” and aeroskirt. It will then continue the journey towards the ISS using its own thrusters on the service module.

This will be the first time this capsule has docked with the Station — the SC2 vehicle was previously the only Starliner capsule to do this on the OFT-2 demonstration mission. SC3 Calypso will then dock to the forward port of the Harmony module a day later and will stay at the Station for around seven days. This will be Calypso‘s second flight into space, having already chalked up two days of flight time on the uncrewed orbital flight test (OFT-1) mission in December 2019.

This CFT mission will achieve several milestones. It is the first crewed launch of this new vehicle, the first from the pad at SLC-41, and the first from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station since the launch of Apollo 7 in 1968. This will also be the 100th mission launched by the Atlas V rocket family, the first time an Atlas V carries a crewed spacecraft and the first crewed mission for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that isn’t conducted with a SpaceX capsule. The two experienced NASA astronauts onboard are Commander Barry “Butch” Willmore and Pilot Sunita “Suni” Williams, who will become the first woman to fly on a maiden flight of a new orbital vehicle. Suni named the spacecraft to acknowledge her love of the ocean and about Jacques Cousteau’s ship which bore the same name.

With a diameter of 4.56 meters, Starliner is a little smaller than the Orion capsule used on Artemis missions and slightly larger than Crew Dragon and the Apollo command module. The capsule will typically carry up to four astronauts, with a mix of crew and cargo on each flight. All remaining Atlas launches are already allocated ahead of the vehicle being retired in around eight years. Six of these launches are set aside for Starliner’s missions for NASA to the ISS, as well as Kuiper missions. Starliner could then fly on Vulcan if that vehicle has been certified as human-rated by the time Starliner’s first six flights on Atlas V are complete.

Boeing is already working to prepare the SC2 crew module that flew the OFT-2 mission for the forthcoming Starliner-1 crew mission in 2025. Starliner-1 will stay in orbit for approximately six months. Calypso is then expected to support the second and fourth Starliner crewed missions from 2026 onwards.

Starship seen from above during the wet dress rehearsal. (Credit: SpaceX)

Starship-Super Heavy | Integrated Flight Test 4 (IFT-4)

Ship 29 and Booster 11 are stacked once again, following two wet dress rehearsals and a final destacking to arm the flight termination system. Starship now sits ready for its fourth integrated test flight on Thursday, June 6 with the window opening at 7:00 AM CDT (12:00 UTC) from Orbital Pad A at Starbase in Texas.

Initially, this flight was anticipated to repeat the mission profile and objectives of its predecessor but SpaceX has since clarified a number of significant changes that exclude further propellant transfer or payload door tests. The main focus is on Ship 29 maintaining orientation and surviving the atmospheric onslaught of re-entry. To this end, the team has spent weeks meticulously maintaining and preparing the heat shield tiles. Approximately 18,000 of these ceramic hexagonal tiles are distributed around the face of the vehicle which will be subjected to the stress of re-entry.

“Right now, we are not resilient to the loss of a single tile in most places, as the secondary containment material will probably not survive,” Elon said late last week in a conversation on X. He added that a reusable orbital return heat shield is one of many tough issues to solve with this vehicle, and that “unless we make the heat shield heavy, as is the case with our Dragon capsule, where reliability is paramount, we will only discover the weak points by flying”. He made reference to the Shuttles requiring over six months of refurbishment by a large team after each flight, whereas the long-term vision for Starships is to re-fly them within a day of landing. “This will take a few kicks of the can to solve”, he added, “and requires building a new supply chain for low-cost, high-volume, and yet high-reliability heat shield tiles, but it can be done.”

Heatshield detail on Ship 29. (Credit: Sean Doherty for NSF)

If it does successfully survive the atmospheric onslaught of re-entry, Ship 29 could deliver the first external views through the entire re-entry process through to a surface landing. This would be made possible by the Starlink constellation which brought us spectacular real-time views of plasma interacting with Ship 28 on the previous test flight – for many, the highlight of that mission. SpaceX has addressed issues seen with Ship 28’s attitude control on the previous flight through some additional roll control thrusters. These should provide some resilience and redundancy after the issues were traced to the clogging of valves responsible for roll control.

The flight will, once again, be suborbital and will forego the on-orbit engine relight that would simulate a deorbit burn which was unsuccessful on the previous flight. It is likely that we won’t now see a fully orbital Starship until version 2 vehicles are introduced next year. This time, both vehicles will attempt a virtual landing over water before then being expended, assuming they survive long enough. Booster 11 performs no entry burn and will attempt to demonstrate the deceleration and control required to perform the ambitious tower ‘catch’.

This booster has many additional supports and stringers adding further reinforcement. Findings recently published from flight three showed that six of the 13 center engines used for the boostback and landing burns had shut down prematurely due to a filter blockage on the oxygen feed lines. These engines were subsequently disabled, and only two engines successfully reignited for landing. To address this, additional filtration hardware inside the oxygen tanks and Raptor startup software improvements should support the engine relights that will slow the booster’s landing approach this time.

The hot stage ring sits between Ship 29 and Booster 11. (Credit: Sean Doherty for NSF)

To further aid a smoother ‘landing’, the hot stage ring will be jettisoned immediately after the boostback burn shutdown. SpaceX continues to apply an iterative approach to the design of the hardware for the Starship program and introduced the hot stage ring for the second flight attempt. While there is no official rationale behind the new plans to jettison this ring in the short-term, this move would address the booster’s center of gravity which the ring would have moved up the vehicle from the original modeling before it was added. It perhaps also reduces some impacts that the ring contributed to the aerodynamic flow as well as losing some likely negligible mass.

Prior to its own virtual landing around 65 minutes into the mission, Ship 29 is expected to perform another “flip & burn” maneuver to adjust its belly-down attitude to a vertical one ahead of its own landing burn. This will be the first time this maneuver has been executed since SN15 a little over three years ago when it made the first (and last) soft propulsive landing from a high altitude. It will also be the first time this has been performed with the newer Raptor v2 engines.

Flight 4 is proceeding ahead of closing the mishap investigation which remains open for the previous test after the FAA concluded that there were no public safety issues involved. While this launch is pending the regulatory approval that typically arrives a day or so before launch, it is currently unknown if the amendments will cover this single flight or perhaps the fifth also.

Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 10-1

Assuming the nomenclature in the NOTAM is correct, this would be the first Starlink mission into a Group 10 shell of the second-generation Starlink v2-Mini satellites.

Launch is currently anticipated on Friday, June 7 from SLC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:58 PM EDT (22:58 UTC), implying a turnaround of the pad since the Group 8-5 mission of just two days, 23 hours and 54 minutes. The booster and autonomous droneship supporting this mission have yet to be assigned.

Render of the Virgin Galactic Delta vehicle. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

SpaceShipTwo | Galactic-07

This suborbital launch will be the final commercial flight for VSS Unity before Virgin Galactic shifts focus to the development and testing of its newer Delta class vehicle. This will be Virgin Galactic’s eleventh crewed spaceflight and the seventh commercial and research mission for the SpaceShipTwo vehicle.

Launch is currently scheduled for no earlier than Saturday, June 8, assisted by VMS Eve which will take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Commander Nicole Pecile and pilot Jameel Janjua from Virgin Galactic will be joined by two private Americans, a private Italian, and a researcher affiliated with Axiom Space. Research payloads include a rack-mounted experiment from Purdue University which will study propellant slosh in fuel tanks, and another testing a new type of 3D printing from UC Berkeley.

The company’s suborbital competitor Blue Origin finally returned to crewed flights of its New Shepard vehicle late last month for the first time in 18 months. Virgin Galactic will spend at least a similar period in craft development now.
The company announced late last year that it would begin to fly on a quarterly basis and only two or three more times before pivoting to focus efforts on developing and testing the new Delta class vehicle. This new craft will be able to fly six rather than four passengers up to twice a week from 2026 following a test flight which is currently anticipated in mid to late 2025 and is expected to increase monthly revenues tenfold.

(Lead image: Ship 29 stacked atop Booster 11 on the pad at Starbase ahead of IFT-4. Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF )

The post Launch Roundup – Starship ready for fourth flight, Starliner rescheduled for third attempt, Virgin Galactic to fly VSS Unity for last time appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.



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