The last (eighteenth) launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 missile this year, it is "irrecoverable"
For tonight, the last launch of the SpaceX rocket is planned this year. The Falcon 9 rocket will put 10 satellites into orbit, commissioned by Iridium.
For this launch, a rocket will be used, which has already traveled to space and returned safely to Earth. But this time the return of the first stage is not provided for, landing rockets and shunting arrays are dismantled from the rocket. Thus, after working out its part of the mission, the first stage will fall to the Earth.
It is not yet specified why this time it was decided not to return the first stage of the rocket. SpaceX had already carried out launches on the order of Iridium, and three times successfully returned the rocket. Moreover, the launch profiles were almost identical to the current launch. The SpaceX statement says that the decision to land a rocket is made each time individually, based on the requirements of the mission and the requirements of the manifesto. In this case, the chief executive officer of the company Iridium, Matt Desch said that the weight of the satellites does not prevent the landing of the rocket.
Probably, SpaceX simply does not intend to re-create this rocket instance after launch, since it refers to an already obsolete version of Falcon 9. The first stage used in this mission is the version of Block 3. It was already used for one of the previous launches for Iridium in June this year. But in the future SpaceX intends to use the most advanced modification of the Falcon 9 missile called Block 5. The head of the company Ilon Mask previously stated that the modification of Block 5 will improve the performance of the missile, and also facilitate the reuse of the Falcon 9.
Today's launch will be the 18th launch for SpaceX, carried out in 2017. This year was extremely successful for the company. She successfully landed all the first stages of the missiles in the missions in which the landing was planned. In total, in the course of 2017, 14 rockets were recovered, and for all time - from December 2015 - already 20 rockets. Taking into account today's launch, SpaceX will carry out 5 repeated launches of rockets that have already traveled to space and successfully returned to Earth. In all previous cases of startups used. they successfully landed after repeated launches. Thus, this will be the first time when after the second stratum the rocket will not land.
Launch of the Falcon 9 carried out from the air base Vandenberg in California.
SpaceX successfully put into orbit ten satellites. Iridium has already confirmed that they all normally transmit signals.
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Thus, this year SpaceX performed 18 of 28 general US launches and this is an impressive result. We are looking forward to launching the super-heavy Falcon Heavy launch vehicle early next year. If you suddenly missed, then the other day we published pictures of this monstrous rocket.
