SpaceX is preparing to launch a pair of Maxar Space Systems' WorldView Legion satellites into a medium inclination orbit Thursday morning. The 30-centimeter imaging satellites will travel into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket that will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Station.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) is scheduled to begin a 60-minute period at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 UTC). Those watching the launch on or near Florida's Space Coast can expect to hear a sonic boom as the first-stage rocket returns for a landing at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning approximately one hour before liftoff.
Ahead of Thursday's launch, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions during the launch window. Forecasters said a front moving toward the area “could generate a few scattered showers and thunderstorms near the spaceport.”
The Falcon 9 first-stage rocket supporting this mission, B1076 in the SpaceX fleet, will launch for the 16th time. It previously launched SpaceX’s 26th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-26) mission to the International Space Station, a batch of 40 OneWeb satellites, and eight Starlink flights, among others.
Nearly eight minutes after liftoff, B1076 will land at LZ-1. It will be the 43rd landing of a rocket at this site and the 339th to date.
Second round for WorldView Legion
The launch comes about three months after the first pair of WorldView Legion satellites launched into a sun-synchronous polar orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Maxar launched images from those satellites over the past month.
Once these six satellites are in orbit, Maxar said it will be able to offer customers the ability to have a satellite view of a particular location up to 15 times a day.
WorldView satellites are designed to operate for ten years and provide high-resolution images using eight-band multispectral imaging in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectrum.
The spacecraft are 3 m x 2 m x 2 m (9.8 ft x 6.6 ft x 6.6 ft) in size and have a dry mass of approximately 630 kg (1,389 lb). They will orbit Earth at an altitude of 518 km (321 mi).
Maxar developed its own satellite dispenser for these missions. In a blog post about it earlier this month, it mentioned that the aluminum dispenser was used during the WorldView Legion launch in May 2024 and that other customers whose satellites are built with Maxar’s 500-series bus can use it.
“From the beginning, we thought that by designing a proprietary dispenser, you have more freedom,” Wen Lee, a Maxar mission control engineer who contributed to the design and development of the dispenser, said in a statement. “It gives us more freedom to design a spacecraft suitable for the mission without being limited by the dispenser interface requirements offered by the launch provider; in the end, it also costs less.”
The final pair of satellites is expected to be launched later this year.
We designed a new custom dispenser for the launch of the WorldView Legion satellites. It holds the satellites to the launch vehicle, protects them during launch, and helps get them into orbit. We worked with @ScotForge and Tech-Max to create the dispenser.
More details about… image.twitter.com/dG8HYT247b
– Maxar Technologies (@Maxar) August 7, 2024
