Miami, Apr 30 (EFE).- The SpaceX company launched its Falcon 9 Heavy rocket this Sunday from Cape Canaveral (Florida) to put satellites of the telecommunications companies ViaSat, Astranis and Gravity Space into orbit, a launch that had been postponed in three times.
The 57-minute window for Sunday’s launch from Pad 39a at the Kennedy Space Center opened at 7:29 p.m. local time (2329 GMT) and liftoff took place exactly one hour later.
Less than five minutes in the air, the two boosters flanking the main rocket ship separated as planned, followed by the first rocket stage, which is recoverable.
The three satellites carried by the Falcon 9 Heavy will reach geostationary orbit, that is, at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometers above the equator, between 4:30 and 5 hours after takeoff.
Last Friday, with just 59 seconds to go until liftoff, SpaceX decided to abort the launch of its super rocket for reasons not reported.
Launches had previously been canceled last Wednesday and Thursday due to bad weather conditions in the area.
The main cargo is the ViaSat-3 Americas broadband satellite, weighing about 5,400 kilos and the size of a school bus, which is the largest capacity of all existing today.
The ViaSat 3 Americas, built by Boeing, is a high-powered spacecraft that will transmit Internet signals to rural consumers and passengers on planes and ships in North and South America.
The Californian company plans to launch two more satellites of the same class later to cover other areas of the planet. The second is now undergoing environmental testing at Boeing’s El Segundo, California factory and will be used for communications in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The third ViaSat-3 satellite is now in the final phase of integration and payload testing at Viasat’s Tempe, Arizona facility and will focus on the Asia Pacific region, completing Viasat’s global service coverage.
Precisely Viasat announced this Sunday that the third ViaSat 3 satellite, designed to serve the Asia-Pacific region and called ViaSat 3 APAC, will no longer be launched on Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket,
The Ariane 6 rocket, which the European Space Agency and ArianeGroup are developing to replace the Ariane 5, is now scheduled for later this year, after years of delays, and the California company decided to look for another supplier, according to Spaceflight.com.
Another of the satellites launched this Sunday by the Falcon 9 Heavy is Arcturus from the Astranis firm, weighing just over 300 kilos and which will provide high-speed connectivity in the Alaska region and surroundings, and the third is GS-1, a cubesat to be operated by Washington-based Gravity Space.
This was the sixth flight of the Falcon 9 Heavy since 2018.
The Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 rocket cores that form a compact booster that soars, powered by 27 Merlin engines and powered by 18 commercial aircraft.
According to SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy is considered “one of the world’s most powerful operational rockets” and can lift nearly 64 metric tons into orbit.
This 70 meter high and 12 meter wide rocket made its first test flight in 2018, when it put a Tesla car into space, which was followed by four other launches, the last of which was with the classified mission USSF- 67 carried out in January of this year on behalf of the US Space Force.
