With five rockets scheduled to live in a period of just 20 hours, February 4 might be one of the busiest days in the space sector. The event involves four different space agencies, sending communication satellites and launching payloads for governments.
According to Space.com, if these launches went as planned, it would be recorded as the highest number of launches in a single day. SpaceX has already launched its batch of Starlink internet satellites from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:07 PM IST today.
Next up is Blue Origin’s New Shepherd rocket, which is part of the NS-29 uncrewed research mission. This was scheduled to launch last week with 30 payloads but was cancelled because of bad weather and a rocket problem.
Rocket Lab is also planning to launch its Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. This one is part of the ‘IoT 4 You and Me’ mission and is carrying five satellites for a French company named Kineis. It will liftoff at 2:13 AM IST tomorrow.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also planning a send a pair of the Maxar Technology WorldView Legion satellites to space, which will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These satellites are the last in the group of 10 Maxar satellites which are designed to image the rapidly changing areas of Earth. It will be live-streamed on SpaceX’s page at 4:20 AM tomorrow with the launch scheduled for 4:37 AM IST.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos is also set to launch an unknown payload from its Plesetsk Cosmodrome. The classified payload will be launched from Site-43 on a Soyuz 2.1V/Volga rocket at 8:30 AM tomorrow.
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