India to launch Chandrayaan 3 lunar lander mission - TWIRL #122

We have a fair number of rocket launches this week including from private firms SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Landspace. The most interesting by far, though, is the lunar lander mission Chandrayaan 3 which the Indian space agency, ISRO, is launching.

Monday, July 10

The first launch on Monday is a Falcon 9 carrying 22 Starlink mini satellites from Cape Canaveral. The mission is due to launch at 12:36 a.m. UTC and will be streamed on SpaceX’s website. The mission was delayed from July 9.

Wednesday, July 12

The second launch this week comes from China’s Landspace which will be launching the Zhuque ZQ-2 rocket on its second flight. The launch will take place at an unspecified time from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.

In this launch, the first stage will be expendable but the company hopes to be able to make it before a vertical landing in the future so that it can be reused, similar to what SpaceX has achieved.

Thursday, July 13

At 4:35 a.m. UTC on Thursday, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. This group is known as Starlink Group 5-15 and can be found on astronomy apps with this label.

The first stage of the rocket has flown before in a previous launch. If you’re interested in tuning in, the event will be streamed on the SpaceX website.

Friday, July 14

We’ve got two launches on Friday, the first is the Indian space agency’s LVM3 rocket carrying the Chandrayaan 3 lunar lander to the moon. The lander is a replacement for the previous Chandrayaan 2 lunar lander and consists of a Lander module (LM), Propulsion module (PM), and a Rover which will demonstrate technologies for use in interplanetary missions.

The mission will take off from Sriharikota in India at 9:05 a.m. It’s not clear if or where the launch will be streamed live but the ISRO website or YouTube would be good places to look if you’re interested.

Finally, Rocket Lab will send up one of its Electron rockets carrying four Starling Satellites for NASA, LEO 3 for Canadian comms company Telesat, and two CubeSats for Spire Global.

The mission is due for launch at 8:23 p.m. UTC and the event will be live-streamed on Rocket Lab’s website.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was an Ariane 5 carrying the Heinrich Hertz and Syracuse 4B satellites. Sadly, this is the final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket, it’ll be replaced by Ariane 6.

The second and final launch of the week was a Falcon 9 from SpaceX carrying 48 Starlink satellites. The first stage of the Falcon 9 also landed safely.

That’s all for this week, check back next time!

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