SpaceX had announced a completion of the Falcon 9 static fire test on June 8, and is not targeting the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket with RADARSAT on June 12.
RADARSAT is a Canadian remote sensing Earth observation satellite program overseen by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The goal of this project is to produce a satellite for Earth observation by way of a Synthetic Aperture Radar, which is an advanced radar sensor and powerful microwave instrument capable of producing high quality images of the Earth during day or night and across a wide range of weather conditions including cloud cover, smoke, and haze. The latest construction of the RADARSAT satellite includes increased spatial resolution, multiple polarization filters, solid state recorders and a GPS receivers on-board.
The Falcon 9 booster that will be supporting this mission is the same booster that launched the Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station on March. Falcon 9 is set to launch the RADARSAT constellation mission on Wednesday, June 12 at 10:17 a.m. EDT (10:17 p.m. GMT+8) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
On the other hands, the first nigh time launch of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket, and the first Falcon Heavy flight for the US military is set no earlier than June 24 from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The four-hour launch window opens at 11:30 p.m. EDT (June 25 at 11:30 a.m. GMT+8). If Falcon Heavy missed the four-hour launch window on June 24, the next target launch date is two days later than previously planned.
Falcon Heavy will launch 24 satellites into three distinct orbits around the Earth, using up most of the heavy-lift rocket's lift capacity with a series of four upper stage engine burns, the most ever by a SpaceX launch vehicle.
The Falcon Heavy rocket set to fly on the STP-2 mission will use two side boosters recovered after the most recent Falcon Heavy flight April 11, which delivered the commercial Arabsat 6A communications satellite to orbit. The center core booster for the STP-2 mission is fresh from SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California.
Each booster is powered by nine Merlin 1D engines, burning a mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants.
The Air Force agreed to use the side boosters from the Arabsat 6A mission to familiarize military officials with SpaceX’s process of recovering and refurbishing rocket hardware. It is the first time the Air Force has used previously-flown hardware on a military satellite launch.
The drone ship is typically positioned hundreds of miles offshore from Florida. The regulatory filing, which requested authority to operate radio transmitters during the booster’s descent, indicated the vessel will be parked roughly 24 miles (40 kilometers) east-southeast of pad 39A for the center core landing on the STP-2 mission.
Assuming favorable viewing conditions, the nighttime launch of the world’s most powerful rocket — producing 5.1 million pounds of thrust at full throttle — followed minutes later by the return of the three Falcon Heavy boosters to Earth could be a dazzling spectacle.
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