Today could see a new record for space flight, as five separate rocket launches are scheduled for one 24-hour period. The events involve four different providers and show the increasing pace of launches, covering missions including sending communications satellites into Earth orbit, creating short-duration microgravity environments for research purposes, and launching unknown payloads for governments.
The five launches today, Tuesday February 4, will be the highest number of launches in a single day if all go ahead as planned, as noted by Space.com. The first launch has already occurred, with SpaceX launching a Starlink mission from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 5:15 a.m. ET. This mission carries 21 Starlink satellites to add to SpaceX’s communication network, including 13 with Direct to Cell capabilities.
The next launch on the docket is Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-29 Mission, scheduled for 11 a.m. ET. This launch had been planned for last week but was delayed due to both weather conditions and an issue with the booster’s avionics. Taking off from Launch Site One in West Texas, the mission will simulate the moon’s gravity for its 30 payloads on board, which are primarily experiments and technology tests for use in lunar explorations. The payloads will experiences two minutes of lunar gravity, with experiments including those from NASA being on board.
The third launch of the day is New Zealand company Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket launch scheduled for 3:43 p.m. ET. This will be a morning launch from the company’s New Zealand launch site, with the mission named “IOT 4 You and Me” and carrying satellites to add to the IoT constellation from company Kinéis.
Fourth up is yet another SpaceX launch, with the Maxar 3 mission scheduled to launch from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:07 p.m. ET. This will carry a pair of Earth-observations satellites from the Maxar company, as part of a series of missions launching the WorldView satellites.
Finally, there is a mysterious launch from Russian space agency Roscosmos, with an unknown payload scheduled to launch using a Soyuz rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome at 10 p.m. ET.
The previous record for most launches in a day was four, with August 4, 2022 being particularly notable for seeing launches from Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, and SpaceX.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.