![]() ![]() Her people-hauling duties over, B1061 settled last summer into a more regular routine as a payload-lifter. Both crews went on to break records in February 2021 and late last fall for the longest single space missions ever undertaken by a U.S. And those crew-carrying credentials continued in April 2021 when she launched Dragon Endeavour and Crew-2 astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of NASA, together with France’s Thomas Pesquet and Japan’s Aki Hoshide. She first flew back in November 2020, when she launched Dragon Resilience and the four Crew-1 astronauts-NASA’s Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, plus Japan’s Soichi Noguchi-to the station. Photo Credit: SpaceXīut Transporter-4 was flown on the heels of an already stellar career which saw B1061 launch not one, but two crews of humans to the ISS. Rain and storm chances, noted the 45th Weather Squadron at Patrick Space Force Base in its L-3 update on Sunday, tended to favor the late-morning hours as the East Coast sea-breeze develops and moves inland.įor the eighth time in her 18-month career, B1061 takes flight. Weather conditions for the Transporter-5 launch on Wednesday afternoon proved highly favorable, with a 90-percent chance of acceptable conditions during a relatively spacious, 57-minute “window”, which opened at 2:27 p.m. And it has now flown 22 missions in the year’s first 20 weeks, rendering it increasingly likely that Elon Musk’s pledge of 60 launches in 2022 may yet come to pass. With this week’s Transporter-5 mission, May 2022 becomes only the third time since last Christmas that SpaceX has completed five or more launches in a single calendar month. Before today’s launch, B1061 also flew the most recent Transporter mission back on April Fool’s Day. Then came a spectacular salvo of three launches within a five-day period, as five-times-flown B1063 lifted another 53 Starlinks out of Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., on 13 May, “new kid on the block” B1073 hauled another 53 satellites uphill from the Cape’s SLC-40 only 22 hours later on the 14th and five-times-used B1052 doing likewise from Pad 39A just last Wednesday. The Transporter 5 mission launches 59 private satellites from Pad 40 of CCSFSįirst up was the joint fleet-leader B1058, which became only the third Falcon 9 core to log a 12th launch, which rose from historic Pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and delivered 53 Starlink internet communications satellites to low-Earth orbit on 6 May. ![]() crewed vehicle, SpaceX staged no less than four launches from the East and West Coasts in only a dozen days. astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, together with Germany’s Matthias Maurer, after the second-longest flight by a U.S. No sooner had Dragon Endurance returned safely home on the 3rd, carrying U.S. After a spectacular April- which saw the Hawthorne, Calif.-headquartered organization fly six times in a single calendar month, achieve a new Falcon 9 turnaround record and execute a pair of Crew Dragon flights to the International Space Station (ISS)-it seemed that the bar had been set very high for May. ![]()
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