Falcon Heavy blasts off to bookend a double launch day for SpaceX

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ORLANDO, Fla. — SpaceX pulled off double duty from the Space Coast on Friday managing both a Falcon 9 launch just after midnight and a rare launch of its powerhouse Falcon Heavy 23 hours later, the latter coming with a pair of double sonic booms from the successful return of two of its three boosters.

First up was the Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 12:01 a.m. carrying 22 Starlink satellites into orbit. It was SpaceX’s 50th orbital launch of the year including missions from Florida and California.

The Falcon Heavy became the 51st after it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at 11:04 p.m. carrying up a massive telecom satellite for Hughes Network Systems called the Jupiter 3.

For the Space Coast, it marked the 37th and 38th launches of the year from either KSC or Cape Canaveral, with SpaceX responsible for all but two of them.

The pair of launches also became the 249th and 250th successful orbital launches for SpaceX since its first Falcon 1 launch in 2008.

By the end of the day, SpaceX had also managed three of the four boosters on its two flights. For the Falcon 9 mission, the first-stage booster flew for a 15th time making another recovery landing downrange on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean. Two previous recent Starlink mission boosters hold the record having flown 16 times.

For the Falcon Heavy launch, the two side boosters made their return to Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1 and Landing Zone 2, bringing with it the double sonic boom that SpaceX had warned might be heard, and felt, across Central Florida.

Their landing marked their third trip to space having each flown on two previous Space Force missions. The center booster’s fuel, though, was needed to get the payload to its geosynchronous transfer orbit about 22,000 miles above Earth, so no recovery landing was possible. It instead fell into the Atlantic down range after expending its fuel.

The three landings bring SpaceX’s total to 212 recoveries since the first one in 2015. The company has also now reused boosters for launches 185 times.

Falcon Heavy is one of the most powerful available for Space Coast launches, essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together that produce 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

Taking advantage of that lift capacity, the Jupiter 3 satellite, also called the EchoStar XXIV, which was built by Maxar Technologies out of Palo Alto, California, weighs more than 22,000 pounds and will be the largest commercial communications satellite in orbit once fully deployed with a wingspan of a commercial airliner, according to a news release from Hughes. It will provide broadband to the U.S. and Latin America.

It was originally targeting a launch on Wednesday, but SpaceX aborted that attempt just more than a minute before liftoff, and then opted to delay until Friday.

At one point, the Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 thought it would be supporting both launches on Thursday night potentially setting up liftoffs within an hour of one another. That would have set a Space Coast record.

The existing record between launches from the Space Coast came on Sept. 12, 1966 when the Gemini XI mission launched its Agena Target Vehicle from what was then Cape Kennedy’s Launch Complex 14 one hour and 37 minutes before astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad and Richard Gordon launched on their Titan II rocket on mile north from Launch Complex 19. The Gemini and Agena vehicles were launched in tandem during the program that laid the groundwork for the Apollo moon missions.

In the end the two missions lifted off 23 hours and three minutes apart.

Friday’s Falcon Heavy launch was only the seventh time it had ever taken off. Its first launch in 2018 was a test mission that brought more than an estimated 100,000 fans out to the Space Coast to watch the rocket send Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster into space. It then flew a pair of missions in 2019 before finally getting back to launches in November 2022 after a three-year hiatus.

During that run, it was the most powerful rocket in use until NASA’s Space Launch System successfully lifted off on the Artemis I mission to the moon.

For 2023, the pace for Falcon Heavy use has picked up, having already flown in January and May. It has two more potential launches before the end of the year after the EchoStar mission. Those include its first deep-space mission for NASA, which will send a probe named Psyche to an asteroid of the same name targeting launch as early as Oct. 5. It also has what would be its third Department of Defense mission that could fly as early as November.

The rocket is becoming a heavy lift workhorse for SpaceX while the company continues efforts to build out its Starship and Super Heavy rocket.

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