SpaceX Launches Super-Heavy Satellite Atop Falcon 9 Rocket (usatoday.com)

SpaceX has successfully launched a heavy commercial communications satellite atop one of its Falcon 9 rockets today. "Weighing in at nearly 13,500 pounds atop the rocket, the fourth Inmarsat-5 satellite was the heaviest load lofted by a Falcon 9 yet," reports USA Today. From the report: The 230-foot rocket delivered the spacecraft larger than a double-decker bus to an orbit more than 22,000 miles over the equator. As a result, SpaceX did not attempt to land the rocket's first stage either at Cape Canaveral or at sea, and the Falcon 9 booster was not equipped with landing legs. The Inmarsat-5 Flight 4 satellite, built by Boeing, completes Inmarsat's four-satellite Global Xpress constellation focused on delivering high-speed broadband data to mobile customers, including commercial aircraft and ships and the U.S. military.

Comments

Re:Mysterious units

[feargal]

A football field is a unit of area, not distance. However, since we know a mile is eight furlongs, there's five furlongs to a kilometer, and approximately forty-five and a half brontosauruses per kilometer, we can quickly do the maths:

22,000 * 8 / 5 * 45.5 gives us an approximate distance of 1,601,600 apatosauruses. And since we know five brontosauses can be laid along the length of a football field we can correct the sentence from the article.

The 500-linguine rocket delivered the spacecraft larger than 237,000 grapefruits to an orbit higher than 320,320 football fields if they placed vertically end-to-end over the equator.