Firefly Aerospace will take one other crack at reaching orbit on Sunday (Sept. 11), and you may watch it reside.
The Texas-based firm plans to launch its Alpha rocket on a take a look at mission from California’s Vandenberg House Power Base on Sunday (Sept. 11) at 6 p.m. EDT (3 p.m. native California time; 2200 GMT). You’ll be able to watch the liftoff through Firefly (opens in new tab) and its livestream accomplice, EverydayAstronaut.com (opens in new tab); House.com will carry that webcast as nicely, if doable.
This can be Alpha’s second try and make it to orbit. The primary attempt, which launched from Vandenberg on Sept. 2, 2021, ended in a dramatic fireball after the 95-foot-tall (29 meters) rocket suffered a significant anomaly.
Video: Watch Firefly Aerospace use a rocket engine to light birthday candles
A Firefly investigation decided that one in every of Alpha’s 4 first-stage Reaver engines shut down just 15 seconds into that flight. The corporate traced the issue to the untimely closure of the engine’s predominant propellant valves. Firefly addressed the problem and now has Alpha again on the pad. Â
The rocket can be carrying satellites on Sunday’s mission, because it did throughout final yr’s launch. Flying aboard Alpha this time round are two tiny cubesats — Serenity, offered by the nonprofit Lecturers in House, which can collect flight knowledge for academic functions; and TES-15, a collaboration between NASA and San Jose State College that may take a look at a de-orbiting “exo-brake.”
Alpha can be carrying a deployer known as PicoBus that may eject a handful of even smaller “picosats” into orbit, Firefly wrote in a mission description (opens in new tab).
Alpha is an expendable rocket designed to provide small satellites devoted rides to orbit, a lot as Rocket Lab’s 59-foot-tall (18 m) Electron at present does. Alpha can loft 2,580 kilos (1,170 kilograms) to low Earth orbit at a value of $15 million per launch, in response to Firefly’s Alpha user’s guide (opens in new tab).
The Alpha launch is simply a part of the spaceflight motion this weekend: SpaceX lofted one other huge batch of its Starlink broadband satellites on Saturday evening (Sept. 10) together with the huge BlueWalker 3 test satellite, a pathfinder for AST SpaceMobile’s deliberate direct-to-cellphone connectivity constellation.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide concerning the seek for alien life. Comply with him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab). Â
