SpaceX scrubs Falcon 9 launch attempt with Eutelsat satellite – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX’s oldest active Falcon 9 rocket booster, in service since 2018, is scheduled to make its final flight Tuesday night to deliver a Eutelsat broadband communications satellite into orbit on a mission to provide internet services to airplanes and ships across the North Atlantic, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The mission will complete a series of four major satellite launches for Eutelsat since early September.

The Eutelsat 10B satellite is set to lift off on top of a Falcon 9 rocket at 9:57 p.m. EST Tuesday (0257 GMT Wednesday) from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Eutelsat 10B is heading toward a perch in geostationary orbit to beam communications signals across a coverage zone from the North Atlantic to Asia, employing more than 100 spot beams to connect airline and cruise ship passengers, maritime crews, and other users on-the-go.

A launch attempt Monday night was scrubbed a couple of hours before liftoff to “allow for additional pre-flight checkouts,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX won’t recover the first stage of the 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket. The launch company has an agreement with Eutelsat to dedicate all of the Falcon 9’s lift capability to sending the Eutelsat 10B satellite into as high of an orbit as possible, without reserving and propellant on the first stage for landing maneuvers.

There’s just a 20% probability of favorable weather for launch Tuesday night, according to the official outlook from the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron.

A few miles north of pad 40, SpaceX is readying a different Falcon 9 rocket for launch Tuesday from Kennedy Space Center on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The weather forecast for that launch, set for 3:54 p.m. EST (2054 GMT) Tuesday, is also iffy with a 30% chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff.

Eutelsat 10B will deploy from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage about 35 minutes after launch. The rocket will aim to release the spacecraft into a “super synchronous” transfer orbit with an apogee, or farthest point from Earth, well above Eutelsat 10B’s final operating altitude of 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers). The target apogee for the Eutelsat 10B mission at spacecraft deployment will be above 37,000 miles, or about 60,000 kilometers, according to Pascal Homsy, Eutelsat’s chief technical officer.

Instead of reserving some of its propellant for landing on a drone ship, the Falcon 9’s first stage booster will burn its nine main engines a few seconds longer than usual, giving an extra burst of speed to the rocket’s upper stage. That will allow the Falcon 9’s second stage engine to place the Eutelsat 10B satellite into a higher orbit than would have otherwise been possible.

SpaceX still plans to retrieve the two halves of the…