Two launch pads at Cape Canaveral could host a pair of satellite launches separated by fewer than 17 hours Thursday, a rapid-fire turnaround made possible by an automated range safety mechanism and other upgrades to cut the time between missions at the Florida spaceport.
A spokesperson for Hispasat, which owns a communications satellite set for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, told Spaceflight Now on Monday that the mission is scheduled for liftoff shortly after midnight Thursday, Florida time.
The Falcon 9’s two-hour launch window opens at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) Wednesday, pending final approval from the U.S. Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, which runs the Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral, a network of communications, tracking and safety installations used by every launch from Florida’s Space Coast.
Assuming Air Force officials grant SpaceX’s request for a launch date Wednesday, it would be the first of two blastoffs from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in a span of around 16-and-a-half hours.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is on track for launch Thursday during a two-hour launch window beginning at 5:02 p.m. EST (2202 GMT).
The Falcon 9 and Atlas 5 rockets will blast off from Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 and Complex 41 launch pads, two former Titan rocket launch facilities built in the 1960s a mile-and-a-half (2.4 kilometers) apart a few thousand feet from the Atlantic coastline.
The payload aboard the Falcon 9 rocket is Hispasat 30W-6, a Spanish-owned commercial video, data and broadband relay satellite heading for a perch in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.
Built by SSL in Palo Alto, California, Hispasat 30W-6 will replace an aging telecom satellite launched from Cape Canaveral in September 2002 aboard an Atlas 2AS booster.
SpaceX officials delayed the launch of Hispasat 30W-6, previously scheduled for early Sunday, to complete additional inspections on a pressurization system on the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing.
The Atlas 5 mission, which has had its March 1 reservation on the Air Force range for months, is set to deploy NOAA’s GOES-S weather satellite, an advanced, new-generation observatory destined to help forecasters track storms and wildfires across the western United States and the Pacific Ocean.
The range typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis, so if Air Force officials find a scheduling conflict between the missions, the Atlas 5 launch is expected to receive priority.
Ground crews are set to roll out the Atlas 5 rocket to its launch pad Wednesday morning, followed by filling of the first stage’s RP-1 kerosene fuel tank in the afternoon. The countdown will commence Thursday morning.
The Falcon 9 slated to launch with Hispasat 30W-6 completed a hold-down test-firing of its nine Merlin main engines last week. Technicians returned the rocket to its hangar to install the Hispasat telecom satellite and payload fairing. The next step before launch is to return the booster to the launch pad for final countdown preps.
The quick turnaround is primarily enabled by the introduction of an autonomous self-destruct mechanism to SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, an addition that cuts the workload and manpower for each launch from the Air Force and its contractors.
The on-board safety system relies on Global Positioning System satellite navigation data, replacing decades-old radars and tracking equipment that required military officers to manually send commands to destroy errant boosters, and their human and robot passengers, before they could threaten people and property.
The switch is expected to save millions of dollars in infrastructure costs and allow for more launches from Air Force-run ranges at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base, officials said.
The Autonomous Flight Safety System became operational on SpaceX’s Falcon rocket family last year, after several flights in a backup “shadow” mode to allow engineers to check its performance and reliability.
“Implementing AFSS on future launch operations allows us to increase our flexibility, adaptability and efficiency while providing more launch opportunities and greater public safety without having to add additional people,” said Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, in a statement last year. “These changes will not only simplify ground support requirements thereby increasing launch on-time probability, but substantially reduce launch costs.”
Like the manual flight termination system used since the dawn of the Space Age, the on-board safety computer tracks the trajectory of the rocket, ensuring it remains within a predefined corridor and meets other parameters.
With the previous safety system, a Mission Flight Control Officer on the ground in Florida or California would issue the command activate pyrotechnic charges on the rocket if it strayed off course. In the case of the automated safety system, the command comes from a computer aboard the rocket.
The military is still responsible for other support functions for launches from Florida and California, such as weather monitoring, maritime and airspace patrols, and base security.
Air Force and industry officials last year heralded the new automated destruct system, saying that the technology would permit launches from different pads at Cape Canaveral on the same day, an improvement over the minimum 48-hour resets practiced in recent decades.
That claim may become reality this week.
Assuming Air Force managers give their blessing for the back-to-back launches, and if both rockets take off as scheduled, it would be the quickest turnaround between liftoffs at Cape Canaveral since September 1967.
A Delta G booster launched the Biosat 2 recoverable satellite with multiple biological research experiments on the evening of Sept. 7, 1967, followed less than 10 hours later by the blastoff a few miles away of NASA’s robotic Surveyor 5 lunar lander aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket, according to a mission log maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global space activity.
Rockets lifted off from Cape Canaveral less than two hours apart on four occasions in 1966.
Unpiloted Agena vehicles launched by Atlas rockets were used as docking targets for NASA’s two-man Gemini capsules. The Agena targets launched approximately 100 minutes before the Gemini spacecraft took off on top of Titan 2 rockets with two astronauts on-board.