SpaceX successfully launched another 10 Iridium Next satellites from their Vandenburg launch pad today. The launch was originally scheduled for March 30th but was delayed a day due to a testing issue with one of the 10 satellites that turned out to be a cable issue with the test system.
Following a smooth countdown, the flight-proven booster’s nine Merlin 1D engines ignited and liftoff occurred at 10:13 am EDT. The 10 satellites were successfully deployed to orbit an hour later.
This was the 5th Falcon 9 launch of 2018 and 51st overall, as with other recent flights SpaceX elected to not recover the first stage booster as it was an older version and instead focused on the payload fairing recovery. At present we haven’t heard any status other than this from Elon.
Mr Steven is 5 mins away from being under the falling fairing (don’t have live video)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2018
The fairing recovery wasn’t successful as shown by this tweet from Elon Musk
GPS guided parafoil twisted, so fairing impacted water at high speed. Air wake from fairing messing w parafoil steering. Doing helo drop tests in next few weeks to solve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2018
Today also marks the one year anniversary of SpaceX’s first flight-proven booster launch and with this launch, they have now reused ten boosters.
The launch broadcast we cut off after the 2nd stage engine cut-off due to a licensing issue with NOAA as seen here.
So here’s the NOAA issue: pic.twitter.com/Lj0007qpdN
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) March 30, 2018
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