On the night of Sunday (August 11), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch for the 22nd time – a new record.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the two Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:02 p.m. EDT (7:02 p.m. California time; 2:02 a.m. GMT August 12) on Sunday.
SpaceX will stream the launch live via its X account starting approximately 15 minutes before launch.
If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth about 8.5 minutes after launch and land on the SpaceX drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You,” which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.
According to a mission description from SpaceX, it will be the 22nd launch and landing of this particular booster, tying the company’s rocket reuse record set last June during the launch of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites.
Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 upper stage will continue to deliver the ASBM satellites into orbit. It will deploy the first one 42.5 minutes after launch and the second one five minutes later.
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ASBM “is designed to extend the US Space Force and Space Norway’s broadband coverage to the Arctic,” says space giant Northrop Grumman, which built the mission’s two satellites. (Space Norway is a state-owned company that develops and manages the country’s strategic space infrastructure.)
The ASBM satellites, which operate in a highly elliptical orbit to reach their coverage area, carry several instruments, “including military payloads for the U.S. and Norwegian armed forces, as well as a commercial payload for Viasat and a radiation monitor for the European Commission,” Northrop Grumman wrote in its mission description.
Sunday’s launch is part of a busy weekend for SpaceX. On Saturday morning (Aug. 10), the company launched 21 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. SpaceX attempted to launch another batch of Starlink from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, also located on Florida’s Space Coast, on Sunday morning, but aborted the attempt 46 seconds before the end of the countdown.
