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Falcon 9

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1 Jul, 2023

SpaceX launches Euclid Space Telescope

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SpaceX launches the Euclid Space Telescope for the European Space Agency. Launching at 11:12 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines ignited and sent Falcon 9 and Euclid to space. It landed back on Earth just over eight and a half minutes later. This was the second launch for the Falcon 9 Booster 1080. Its first-stage engines burned for just over two-and-a-half minutes before stage separation and eventual ignition of the single Merlin 1D MVac second-stage engine, which performed a burn for just over five minutes. Then followed a nine-minute coast phase, and the second stage reignited for a 90-second engine burn to set up momentum for Euclid to be sent on its way to the Lagrange point 2 transfer orbit. After the 2nd stage coasted for approximately 20 minutes, spacecraft separation took place. SpaceX used brand new fairings for the launch.

12 Jun, 2023

200th Falcon 9 booster landing

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In a rideshare mission called Transporter-8, SpaceX launches a Falcon 9 rocket containing 72 small satellites from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base to orbit and lands the returning booster, eight minutes later, back on Earth, marking the 200th booster landing in SpaceX’s history. This is the ninth launch and landing for this particular booster. The rocket’s upper stage continued hauling aloft the 72 payloads, which included “cubesats, microsats, a re-entry capsule and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time.” The satellites deployed from the Falcon 9’s upper stage, separate over a 24-minute span, beginning an hour after liftoff. Transporter-8 was SpaceX’s second mission in about 14 hours, the eighth small-satellite “rideshare” mission launched by SpaceX, and its third such flight of 2023.

20 Jul, 2015

Support strut probably caused failure

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Musk says a support strut holding one of the helium tanks likely fractured near a bolt attach point, and wanted to move to the top of the Falcon 9’s second stage. Several helium tanks, each pressurized to about 5,500 pounds per square inch, are mounted inside the rocket’s second stage liquid oxygen tank. The helium is routed through the second stage’s Merlin engine, where the helium warms up and injected into the rocket’s propellant tanks to pressurize the stage as the launcher burns fuel, keeping the tanks structurally sound. Musk:

It may seem sort of counterintuitive that, as the rocket’s accelerating, that something immersed in the tank would actually want to go up more, but that’s basically what happened. The buoyancy increases proportionate to the G-loading. At approximately 3.2 Gs, this strut holding down one of the helium bottles appears to have snapped, and as a result, releasing a lot of helium into the upper stage oxygen tank and causing an over-pressure event quite quickly…Within the course of a second, this caused enough helium to be released, we believe, to over-pressurize the liquid oxygen tank in the upper stage. You don’t really need to release a lot of helium because there’s only about 2 percent gaseous volume in the stage because the upper stage propellant is not being consumed.