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      Next year, SpaceX aims to average one launch every 2.5 days

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 20 October, 2023 - 20:12

    A Falcon 9 rocket climbs into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with 22 Starlink satellites Tuesday night in this long-exposure photo.

    Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket climbs into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with 22 Starlink satellites Tuesday night in this long-exposure photo. (credit: SpaceX )

    Earlier this week, SpaceX launched for the 75th time this year, continuing a flight cadence that should see the company come close to 100 missions by the end of December.

    SpaceX plans to kick its launch rate into a higher gear in 2024. This will be largely driven by launches of upgraded Starlink satellites with the ability to connect directly with consumer cell phones , a service SpaceX calls "Starlink Direct to Cell," a company official told Ars this week.

    The goal next year is 12 launches per month, for a total of 144 Falcon rocket flights. Like this year, most of those missions will be primarily devoted to launching Starlink broadband satellites. So far in 2023, more than 60 percent of SpaceX's launches have delivered the company's own Starlink satellites into orbit.

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      Psyché : les photos splendides du Falcon Heavy, la surpuissante fusée de SpaceX

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Monday, 16 October, 2023 - 07:52

    fusée Falcon Heavy Une

    L'agence spatiale américaine et SpaceX ont mis en ligne plusieurs photos du décollage du lanceur Falcon Heavy, qui a servi le 13 octobre à envoyer la mission Psyché dans l'espace. [Lire la suite]

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      NASA is about to launch a mission of pure discovery to a metal asteroid

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 13 October, 2023 - 13:42 · 1 minute

    NASA's Psyche spacecraft is cocooned inside the payload shroud on top of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.

    Enlarge / NASA's Psyche spacecraft is cocooned inside the payload shroud on top of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann/Ars Technica)

    A roughly 3-ton spacecraft is ready for launch Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-year trip to an enigma in the asteroid belt, an unusual metallic world the size of Massachusetts that could hold clues about the formation of Earth and other rocky planets.

    This mission, named Psyche, will survey its namesake asteroid for at least 26 months, moving to different altitudes to map the metal world with three science instruments. Like all missions exploring the Solar System, the Psyche spacecraft has a long journey to reach its destination, covering some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) with the help of plasma engines.

    No one knows what the spacecraft will find when it reaches the asteroid Psyche. The best images of the asteroid captured through telescopes only show Psyche as a fuzzy blob a few pixels wide. Scientists know it is dense and at least partially made of metal, primarily iron and nickel. The leading hypothesis among Psyche's science team is that the asteroid is likely a leftover remnant from the early history of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago, the exposed core of a failed planet that may have had its outer layers of rock blasted away during collisions with other objects in that chaotic time.

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      Suivez le départ de la surpuissante fusée de SpaceX pour « explorer un monde de métal »

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Friday, 13 October, 2023 - 09:25

    falcon heavy

    SpaceX fait partir une fusée Falcon Heavy le 13 octobre 2023. À son bord, une sonde qui traversera l'espace pour rejoindre l'astéroïde Psyché, qui a une composition métallique. [Lire la suite]

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      Suivez le vol de la surpuissante fusée de SpaceX pour « explorer un monde de métal »

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Friday, 13 October, 2023 - 07:03

    falcon heavy

    SpaceX fait partir une fusée Falcon Heavy le 13 octobre 2023. À son bord, une sonde qui traversera l'espace pour rejoindre l'astéroïde Psyché, qui a une composition métallique. [Lire la suite]

    Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/

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      Suivez l’envol de la surpuissante fusée de SpaceX pour « explorer un monde de métal »

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Thursday, 12 October, 2023 - 05:30

    falcon heavy

    Une fusée Falcon Heavy décolle le 12 octobre 2023 des États-Unis. bord, une sonde scientifique qui voyagera jusqu'à un astéroïde dont la composition est fortement métallique. [Lire la suite]

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      SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is about to become a workhorse for NASA

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 10 October, 2023 - 00:19

    SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is about to become a workhorse for NASA

    Enlarge

    You can consider this the start of NASA's Falcon Heavy era. The launch of the Psyche asteroid mission this week is the opening act among five launches the space agency has directly reserved on SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket over the next few years.

    These Falcon Heavy flights will cut across NASA's portfolio of robotic space missions, dispatching probes deep into the Solar System, deploying a flagship-class astronomical observatory, sending up a weather satellite, and launching the keystone to NASA's Gateway mini-space station around the Moon.

    The launch of the Psyche asteroid explorer , scheduled for Thursday from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, kicks it off. "We’ve been preparing for this for several years, and we’ve benefited from SpaceX's manifest. They’ve launched four Falcon Heavies since last November," said Tim Dunn, a NASA launch director based at the Florida spaceport.

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      La plus grosse fusée de SpaceX se prépare à redécoller

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Saturday, 30 September, 2023 - 07:00

    Falcon Heavy

    SpaceX doit organiser fin septembre un essai de mise à feu statique du Falcon Heavy, sa plus puissante fusée opérationnelle. Elle sera mise à contribution courant octobre pour envoyer une sonde vers un astéroïde, Psyché. [Lire la suite]

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      SpaceX broke its record for number of launches in a year

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 7 September, 2023 - 21:24

    A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off August 31 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

    Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off August 31 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (credit: SpaceX )

    It probably seems like SpaceX is launching almost every day, and that's not far from the case. It also might seem like SpaceX is regularly breaking one of its records, whether it's in the number of launches, turnaround time, or reusing Falcon 9 boosters. It's also true.

    SpaceX blew past one of those records over Labor Day weekend when the company launched a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission was SpaceX's 62nd launch of the year using its Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket, or 63rd if you count the test flight of the Starship mega-rocket in April.

    SpaceX has launched 83 Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions over the past 12 months.

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