Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen grass Luo Yuzi for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, September 11 (Xinhua)-- 9: 00 p.m. Local time on Saturday night local time, Magi 20 SpaceX launched a novel commercial communications satellite into orbit with Falcon 9, once again setting a new launch record for the Falcon 9 rocket.

CTOnews.com learned that this was SpaceX's 41st launch in 2022, with a B1058 booster, its 14th mission, and that it had set more than one new record for the company.

Falcon 9 was launched from launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in NASA, Florida, carrying BlueWalker 3 and other satellites.

According to reports, this is a prototype satellite built by AST SpaceMobile, which is also the second prototype satellite put into use by AST SpaceMobile, and claims to be "the largest commercial communication array ever flown in space."

The BlueWalker 3 weighs approximately 1.5t and consists of a 1.28m (4.2ft) wide central control node and a large deployable structure made of modular square tiles that provides phased array antennas on one side for communication with cellular equipment and solar cells on the other for power supply. These parts are combined into a cube to facilitate launch and will eventually be expanded into a 64.4 square meter (693 square foot) array in orbit.

The entire AST SpaceMobile constellation consists of 243satellites, orbiting at altitudes between 725km and 740km: 18 in equatorial orbit, 150 at an inclination of 40 degrees and 75 at an inclination of 55 degrees.

At the end of 2023, SpaceX will launch the first five operational satellites, the BlueBird Block 1 satellite, for this constellation system, and subsequent versions of the satellites will have a larger deployable array.

The mission is still not the best weather condition. The weather forecast shows that the probability of supporting the launch on Saturday night is about 60%. There are some cumulonimbus clouds, anvil clouds and surface electric field effects in the sky at the time of launch, and the launch has been delayed by 10 minutes than originally planned.

The flight also set a new record for Falcon 9's second phase of ignition. During the more than two-hour journey, the second phase was ignited five times, two of which were to send the BlueWalker 3 spacecraft to an orbit of approximately 513km, and the BlueWalker 3 was deployed approximately 50 minutes after the start of the mission.

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