Following an extremely eventful week in Spaceflight, this coming week returns to “business as usual.” Two SpaceX Starlink missions, one each from Vandenberg and Florida, and a Falcon 9 launching a customer satellite make up the launches for the week. SpaceX is preparing Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center for the upcoming Falcon Heavy launch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES-U satellite on June 25.
Due to this, Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) is taking the full brunt of launches from the east coast and, in doing so, is seeing remarkable turnaround times for every launch. Having started with Starlink Group 8-5 on June 5, followed by Starlink Group 10-1 on June 8, SpaceX intends to launch Starlink Group 10-2 on June 12 and Astra 1P/SES-24 on June 17, bringing the total launch count to four launches in 12 days, all from the same pad, giving an average turnaround time of three days between launches. To put this into perspective, the current record for the fastest turnaround time for any of SpaceX’s three pads is two days and twenty hours.
SpaceX is also growing the launch count on the west coast, with another Starlink launching from Vandenberg with the first batch of Group 9 satellites. There are currently just three launches scheduled for this week, but this figure doesn’t represent the extreme activity across the global launch market this year. SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-2 SpaceX will continue to add Starlink v2 Mini.