SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Argentine Satellite
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched an Argentine Earth observation satellite on Sunday in a rare polar orbit flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The booster lifted off on time at 7:18 p.m. EDT from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and headed south out over the Atlantic Ocean.
The SAOCOM 1B deployed successful 14 minutes after liftoff. The launch was conducted for the Argentine space agency, CONAE.
An hour after launch, the second stage deployed two rideshare payloads, the Tyvak-0172 spacecraft for Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems and the GNOMES-1 satellite for PlanetiQ.
It was the first polar orbit launch from Florida since 1969. The first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral, marking the fourth successful flight for the booster.
Falcon 9’s first stage previously launched Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for SpaceX’s 19th and 20th commercial resupply missions. The stage also supported the launch of SpaceX’s ninth Starlink satellite broadband mission.
SpaceX originally had two launches scheduled from Florida on Sunday. However, bad weather forced the the postponement of the launch of 60 Starlink satellites from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The launch of the 12th Starlink batch has been rescheduled for Tuesday.
5 responses to “SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Argentine Satellite”
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What dog leg? All I saw on the on board was a straight up launch. I guess they bent over and headed south. I guess they got enough altitude to go over Miami. I would like to see a time lapse camera shot like they do with a normal launch. SpaceX did not describe what was going on. Just a polar launch.
The dogleg was to precisely avoid overflying Miami. The flight path is over water, in case an in-flight anomaly triggers AFTS no fragments will fall on the city.
No, the Falcon 9 did flown over Miami. However at no point was the immediate impact point track was over any populated areas.
This is essentially it…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media…
This is a more accurate ground track map done by NSF forum member onespeed. The red track is in case the booster fails to return to the launch site and crash into the Atlantic. The orange track is the ground track for the payload fairings and their recovery zone. The yellow track is the ground track of the upper stage with the payloads.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…