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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.
Heaviest to GTO, not heaviest overall. They've lofted bigger loads to low earth orbit. Iridium flight was over 9 tons. All Dragon missions to ISS (Dragon + Trunk + all the stuff inside and mounted in the trunk) are also heavier than this sat was.
But different orbits, so this is legit heaviest satellite to this specific orbit.
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.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Next time get your "News for Nerds" from a site other than USA Today:
http://spacenews.com/spacex-la...
See. Metric. Although in your defense the article did originally come from Florida Today which is usually a decent site for space coverage.
The limit for recoverability for GTO missions depends on weight and the exact orbit.
A 5300kg (~11600lbs) GTO payload mission has been flown with recovery, wikipedia lists 5500kg as max (perhaps a bit optimistic) for reusable and 8300kg for expendable.
With the same ~33% penalty in payload weight for a recoverable mission, the 5300kg reusable mission could have been a 8000kg expendable mission.
In other words, the 6070kg mission flown yesterday was in just a bit over reusable weight and the in the lower end of expandable mode.
---- Sig. gone.
6100 kilograms for someone actually thinking straight. Don't add precision when you convert.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.