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SpaceX Launches NASA's Planet-Hunting Satellite, Successfully Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket (theverge.com)
SpaceX launched NASA's TESS spacecraft Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship following takeoff. This marks 24 successful landings for SpaceX now, notes The Verge. We will update this post once TESS is deployed into orbit. From the report: TESS is NASA's newest exoplanet hunter. The probe is tasked with staring at stars tens to hundreds of light-years from Earth, watching to see if they blink. When a planet passes in front of a distant star, it dims the star's light ever so slightly. TESS will measure these twinkles from a 13.7-day orbit that extends as far out as the distance of the Moon. The satellite won't get to its final orbit on this launch. Instead, the Falcon 9 will put TESS into a highly elliptical path around Earth first. From there, TESS will slowly adjust its orbit over the next couple of months by igniting its onboard engine multiple times. The spacecraft will even do a flyby of the Moon next month, getting a gravitational boost that will help get the vehicle to its final path around Earth. Overall, it will take about 60 days after launch for TESS to get to its intended orbit; science observations are scheduled to begin in June.
There is a serious savings when they re use a booster, but few of the existing recovered boosters will be saved in the future due to the advent of the Block 5 series which are slightly bigger, have retractable landing gears (rather than removable) and other improvements. Those are the more valuable boosters to save and re use. . The earlier ones are effectively out of date. They may very well use the older used boosters they do have on those missions where recovery is not an issue and they intentionally ditch them.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
You know what Falcon Heavy cost the taxpayers? Nothing, zilch, nada. How much money are we going to waste on ULA before we finally admit it exists to funnel tax dollars and nothing more? SLS is a sad joke in the face of the modern reality.
Good-bye