SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A in Florida on 2023-12-29 at 01:07 UTC for the United States Space Force. The classified mission is designated USSF-52/OTV-7, and will be the seventh launch of the Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), a reusable space plane which can be launched inside the payload fairing of an Atlas 501, Falcon 9, or Falcon Heavy launcher.
This will be the ninth launch of a Falcon Heavy, and the first to launch an X-37. One earlier X-37 mission, OTV-5, was launched on a Falcon 9 on 2017-09-07. The Falcon Heavy core stage, B1084, is making its first and last flight, while the two side boosters, B1064 and B1065, are making their fifth flights together, having last flown 76 days earlier on the NASA Psyche launch on 2023-10-13. The side boosters will return to land near the launch site, while the central core will be expended on this mission. To achieve the performance required, there will be insufficient fuel to attempt re-entry and landing and the core stage will crash into the ocean.
The launch was originally planned for 2023-12-11, but was postponed because the weather forecast gave only a 40% chance of acceptable conditions for launch, but 70% probability 24 hours later. On 2023-12-10 the Falcon Heavy was lowered to a horizontal position to ride out foul weather expected to pass over the launch site later that day. The weather forecast for this attempt is 80% favourable for launch.
X-37 missions are shrouded in secrecy, and coverage of the launch will probably end with landing of the two side boosters, providing no views of the payload, fairing separation, or payload deployment. The target orbit has not been disclosed, but is speculated to be a high inclination and/or high altitude orbit, requiring a Falcon Heavy with expended core stage to reach, as opposed to previous flights launched by Atlas 501 or Falcon 9 single core boosters.
It is all-too-easily ignored that this, the most capable launch vehicle in operation, was entirely privately capitalized. It is more than a mere shame that “space enthusiasts” are sliding back into the same technosocialist fallacy that government should finance high risk technology when, in fact, technical risk management by government is only appropriate when bureaucrats’ lives are quite literally and immediately on the line as they are in times of total war.
To think the blood letting at the hands of “space enthusiasts” in the 1980s may yet be all for naught, despite the mountains of evidence being rammed down their throats by SpaceX makes me want to sentence them all to never setting foot in space should the opportunity ever arise despite their anti-space activism.
These are not innocent bystanders anymore than are those who go along to get along with DEI or whatever the currently fashionable servile moral vanity may be.
Having said that, I recall Musk once opining that Falcon Heavy may have been a mistake because it turned out to be a lot more difficult to go the route of side boosters than he had anticipated. Presumably this is, in part, because he saw how economies of scale with diameter worked in SuperHeavy. But could he really have done an intermediate diameter expansion rather than side boosters within the same capitalization and time constraints? The tradeoffs here are anything but obvious given the need to walk down the industrial learning curve with increasing cadence.
As I recall, he (or perhaps Shotwell) said that due to the protracted development cycle for Falcon Heavy (it was first announced in 2005, with expectation of first flight around 2011, but actually didn’t fly until 2018) and the various upgrades to Falcon 9 which occurred during the period of its development, by the time it was ready for customer launches (April 2019) many of the payloads that were originally expected to need Falcon Heavy were actually able to launch on the uprated Falcon 9. This meant the number of Falcon Heavy launches (the one scheduled for the 12th will only be the ninth in five years) were too few to justify the development costs and maintaining the infrastructure to support it.
Given that the norm for Falcon Heavy has become expending the core stage, mightn’t it have been less expensive to augment Falcon 9 with strap-on solids like Atlas V, which probably cost less than a core stage with 9 engines? Also, back in 2008, Musk said they intended to have a hydrogen fuelled upper stage by around 2013. If they’d done that, it would further expand the payloads that Falcon 9 could handle.
My understanding of Musk’s comment on the expense of the Falcon Heavy was that a lot more engineering had to be done on the core stage for structural support of the side boosters than they had anticipated. If that’s so, then it has two pretty obvious implications: 1) Adding solid side boosters to the Falcon might have run into similar problems, and 2) With the engineering that’s been done already to beef up the core structure, might it be feasible to simply add two more Falcon boosters for a total of 4 so as to re-fly the core on more missions and/or avoid the need for a hydrogen upper stage? Or would that simply invite more of the same engineering nightmare?
I suppose with the present focus on SuperHeavy, and its prospects for greater operational economies combine with the aggressive schedule envisioned to make it quite tempting to just milk the cows to cash in Starlink’s network effects ASAP and get on with the SuperHeavy to force China’s technosocialist clone of SuperHeavy into drawing down its capital reserves.
With the general collapse of public relations communications by SpaceX, material published by others tends to be out of date or only posted shortly before the launch when SpaceX gets around to posting something on their đť•Ź account.
The SpaceX page for this launch still gave the original time for hours after the new time was announced on 𝕏. It has now been updated to “Monday, December 11 at 8:14 p.m. ET” because it is apparently too difficult to also give the time in UTC or even specify whether it’s EST or EDT. At this writing (2023-12-11 15:04 UTC) they have not yet posted anything anywhere about the Starlink 6-34 launch scheduled for a few hours later. The only official announcement of it is the FAA Temporary Flight Restriction for the launch and the Space Force 45th Weather Squadron Launch Mission Execution Forecast.
And we are now hearing Cold War rhetoric out of space enthusiasts as in the below video about China’s methane rocket. This will undoubtedly lead some factions of the military-industrial complex to route pork to SpaceX. At that point we may as well throw in the towel unless Musk wtfu and advocates replacing the 16th Amendment with a single tax on net assets. The closer Starlink gets however to a network effect the less apparent the tax advantage to Musk and he already appears to be counting on that network effect.
China, China, China…—LandSpace is a private Chinese company (although one might say “private with Chinese characteristics” for any enterprise in that communist country). It beat SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, and Relativity Space with a simple smallsat launcher with much less ambition (or potential market) than those competitors’ offerings.
LandSpace are to be congratulated, to be sure, but Pearl Harbor this ain’t.
Hopefully the Falcon will continue to up its cadence, which is within striking distance. It’s looking hopeful that demand is increasing even without lowering the price.
As noted on earlier pictures like this, the “spikes” visible on the southern limb of the Moon are due to shock waves propagating outward from the exhaust plume of the rocket which cause varying refraction of light from the Moon due to difference in air pressure.
