Russia controls six modules aboard the International Space Station. We've all certified it to be, and that we're confident in flying the crewmembers." He added, "We want to make sure it's the safest. Reed echoed that safety focus in his own comments, saying SpaceX undertook a process "to assure that that stage would be ready to go, and absolutely safe to fly the crew as we do for every mission."
Spacex falcon 9 rocket launch full#
"We have full confidence that NASA and SpaceX and the international partners are not going to put us on a rocket or a spacecraft that they feel is not ready to go." "Everybody is certainly on the same page that the hardware needs to be reliable and it needs to be safe," Mann continued. Leadership at SpaceX spoke frequently to the crew about "modifications and challenges" associated with the collision, she said. "We had some very transparent conversations with them," Mann told reporters in a separate livestreamed NASA briefing today that featured the four crewmembers. There’s already another mission set for Sunday, July 24th, out of Florida, to launch another batch of Starlink satellites.Crew-5 includes NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.
Now that SpaceX has beat its record, the company is still moving full steam ahead. Today’s rocket did successfully land on one of SpaceX’s drone ships after takeoff, marking the 125th overall landing of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is also exclusively flying on the Block 5 version of its Falcon 9, which is optimized for reuse. Nearly all of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets that have launched this year have been vehicles that have previously flown before, as the company continues to master landing and reusing its rockets.
All of that, on top of SpaceX’s commercial customers and launches for the Defense Department, create a busy manifest. The company also has its Transporter missions, in which various small satellites are packed together and deployed during a single mission. Thanks to its partnership with NASA, SpaceX periodically sends Dragon capsules - carrying cargo and people - to the International Space Station. The company currently has roughly 2,600 Starlink satellites in orbit.Įven without the Starlink launch, SpaceX has had plenty of other missions to keep the company busy. Today’s flight out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California put up an additional 46 Starlink satellites. The company is using these launches to flesh out its massive internet-from-space Starlink constellation, lofting batches of up to 53 satellites at a time (though the numbers vary from launch to launch). One key factor that allows for such a busy launch schedule is that, in a majority of SpaceX’s launches this year, SpaceX is serving as its own customer. The company was able to get off the ground today, however, after an uninterrupted countdown. It was a rare abort for SpaceX, which hasn’t had to cut a countdown short in many months due to a technical issue. Ironically, SpaceX had originally hoped to launch today’s missions on Thursday but stopped the countdown short after an abort was triggered less than a minute before takeoff. “NASA and SpaceX will have to be watchful during 2022 that they’re not victims of their success,” Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during the January meeting.īut so far, SpaceX has been sticking to its schedule, with nothing but seamless missions this year. That number was revealed by a NASA safety advisory panel in January, with a word of caution that SpaceX should still strive to maintain safety amid the increased pace. For 2021, the company pulled off 31 launches, the most it had ever done, which also made SpaceX the most prolific American launch provider by far.Īt the beginning of 2022, SpaceX set an incredibly ambitious goal of launching 52 missions over the course of the year. SpaceX has been steadily increasing its launch cadence each year - aside from a dip in 2019. And since it’s only July, there’s still plenty of year left to push that record even higher. This afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched its 32nd Falcon 9 mission of 2022, officially breaking the company’s own record for orbital launches conducted in a single year.
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