We have a busy week of rocket launches coming, including Starship IFT-8 - TWIRL #203

We have an extremely busy launch schedule this week with some interesting events including the launch of the 8th Starship mission, which should have happened last week. There are also a ton of Starlink missions happening, which, for the first time, have been put into their own section.

Sunday, 2 March

• Who: Galactic Energy
• What: Ceres 1
• When: 07:59 UTC
• Where: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• Why: Expected to launch some satellites, but it's not clear which.

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1b
• When: 22:22 UTC
• Where: Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
• Why: Roscosmos will launch a Soyuz 2.1b rocket carrying the GLONASS-K2 satellite. This navigation satellite will be placed into a medium Earth orbit.

Monday, 3 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 03:09 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 carrying the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions. The SPHEREx satellite will snap images of the universe in infrared light. It will help astronomers understand more and allow for the study of light coming from more than 450 million galaxies. The PUNCH satellite will consist of four small satellites that will work together to study the sun’s corona. The satellites will also snap images of solar wind leaving the sun to help scientists learn more about space weather.

• Who: Arianespace
• What: Ariane 6
• When: 16:24 UTC
• Where: French Guyana
• Why: An Ariane 6 rocket will be launched carrying the Composante Spatiale Optique (CSO 3) military reconnaissance satellite for the French military. It will replace the Helios 2 spy satellites.

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Starship
• When: 23:30 - 01:09 UTC
• Where: Texas, US
• Why: In this mission, SpaceX will launch Starship on its 8th mission (IFT-8). The objectives will be catching the Super Heavy booster with Mechazilla and deploying four Starlink simulators. We could also see Starship performing a landing.

Thursday, 6 March

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 06:39 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this mission, Transporter-13, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 carrying several satellites to a Sun-synchronous orbit. There will be 27 satellites on this mission from 14 countries.

Starlink missions

• What: Starlink Group 12-20
• When: 02:24 UTC, Monday, 3 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 12-21

   

• When: 06:00 UTC, Wednesday, 5 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 12-16

   

• When: 14:09 UTC, Friday, 7 March

• ---

  What: Starlink Group 11-7

   

• When: 02:00 UTC, Saturday, 8 March

Recap

• The first mission last week was from SpaceX which launched a Falcon 9. It was carrying a batch of Starlink satellites dubbed Starlink Group 15-1. You can see the launch on X.
• Next, Blue Origin launched New Shepard 30 carrying Lane Bess, Jesús Calleja, Tushar Shah, Richard Scott, Elaine Chia Hyde and Russell Ty Wilson up to the edge of space.

• The third mission was notable as SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying the Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander, named Athena, on the IM-2 mission to the Moon. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, Epic Aerospace's orbital tug Chimera-GEO, and AstroForge’s Odin mission were secondary payloads.

• Finally, we got the launch of Starlink Group 12-13 on a Falcon 9 from SpaceX. You can watch that on X too.

That’s it for this week, check in next time!

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