A SpaceX drone ship has gone to the sea for the first of up to five Starlink launches planned in July.
Drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) was towed out of Port Canaveral, Florida on July 2nd, moving setting up SpaceX for its first launch of the second half of 2022. Headed around 664 kilometers (~413 mi) upper east into the Atlantic Ocean, the semi-autonomous modified barge is scheduled to help the Falcon 9 booster recovery portion of SpaceX’s 49th dedicated Starlink launch.
Several postponements and a pad change, launch photographer artist Ben Cooper reports that Starlink 4-21 – one more batch of roughly 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites – is scheduled to launch from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 cushion no sooner than (NET) 9am EDT (13:00 UTC), give or take, on Thursday, July 7th.
The mission will be drone ship JRTI’s 37th Falcon booster recovery attempt and, assuming that successful, its 34th consecutively successful booster landing since January 2017. Ideally going along with it in one piece will be Falcon 9 B1058, which will become the second sponsor to attempt a 13th orbital-class launch and landing when it takes off with Starlink 4-21 later this week. Hawk 9 B1060 turned into the first liquid rocket booster to finish 13 launches on June 17th.
Starlink 4-21 is the first of up to five Starlink launches purportedly planned July and was initially intended to launch from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A pad as soon as June 26th after SpaceX and NASA chose to fundamentally defer a Dragon launch intended to use a similar pad. SpaceX later decided to defer Starlink 4-21 to July 7th and shift it to LC-40 – a move probably intended to let free up Pad 39A for the postponed Dragon’s most recent mid-July launch target.
SpaceX has kept LC-40 perseveringly busy for the first half of 2022 and the pad hasn’t had over three weeks of break between launches since December 2021. It likewise supported consecutive launches on June 19th and 29th, probable explaining Starlink 4-21’s ~10-day delay.
LC-40 will track down no rest in July, all things considered. After Starlink 4-21, Next Spaceflight reports that SpaceX expects to launch Starlink 4-22 and 4-25 from LC-40 or Pad 39A not long after Cargo Dragon’s deferred CRS-25 space station resupply mission takes off around July 14th. On the West Coast, SpaceX will purportedly start launching an entirely different shell of polar-orbiting Starlink satellites with Starlink 3-1 on July 10th and, while improbable after the first mission’s new postponements, Starlink 3-2 before the end of the month.