<\/p>\n Liftoff will take place during a 22-minute window that opens at 4:22 p.m. EDT (2022 GMT; 1:22 p.m. local California time). You can watch it live via SpaceX<\/a> beginning about 10 minutes before launch.<\/p>\n SpaceX’s Starship<\/a> megarocket \u2014 the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built \u2014 is slated to make its 13th test flight<\/a> shortly thereafter. It will lift off from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time).<\/p>\n SpaceX will stream that mission live as well, and Space.com will carry the feed<\/a>. Coverage will begin about half an hour before launch.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Today’s Falcon 9 flight will help assemble the T1TL, a network in low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO) that will be operated by the U.S. Space Force<\/a>‘s Space Development Agency (SDA).<\/p>\n The T1TL “will provide global communications access and deliver persistent regional encrypted connectivity in support of warfighter missions around the globe,” SDA officials wrote in a explainer<\/a>.<\/p>\n The T1TL will eventually consist of 126 satellites, which will be built by York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Forty-two of the spacecraft have reached orbit to date, on two Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg \u2014 one last September<\/a> and another last October<\/a>.<\/p>\n These 126 spacecraft will be part of a larger LEO network that the SDA calls the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.<\/p>\n The PWSA is “a proliferated constellation of hundreds of optically linked small satellites, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), delivering capability at speed to the warfighter,” SDA officials wrote in a Tranche 1 fact sheet<\/a>.<\/p>\n “SDA leverages spiral development to deploy and proliferate new capability into a new generation of the PWSA every two years, called a ‘tranche,’ to continually increase capability used by the warfighter,” they added.<\/p>\n Previous Booster 1103 launches<\/p>\n NROL-179<\/a> | 2 Starlink missions<\/p>\n If everything goes according to plan today, the Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff for a landing in the Pacific Ocean, on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You.” According to a SpaceX mission description<\/a>, it will be the fourth flight for this particular booster, which is designated 1103.<\/p>\n The Falcon 9’s upper stage will haul the 21 satellites to LEO. We don’t know when or exactly where they’ll be deployed; the SpaceX mission description doesn’t provide that information, likely at the request of the SDA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Starship won’t be the only SpaceX rocket flying today, if all goes according to plan. A Falcon 9…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-544397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/media\/img\/spc-logo-w.svg\"){kind=logo}
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