Stay protection: SpaceX to launch closing ViaSat-3 satellite tv for pc on Falcon Heavy rocket – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX is getting ready to launch its first Falcon Heavy rocket in additional than a yr and a half. The Monday morning flight of the triple booster rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will characteristic the touchdown of the 2 facet boosters at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The mission will ship the ViaSat-3 Flight 3 communications satellite tv for pc to a geosynchronous switch orbit. The six-metric-ton satellite tv for pc is about to deploy from the rocket’s higher stage practically 5 hours after leaving the pad.

“It’s kind of the end of an era. We’ve been working this program for over 10 years now. So that’s a good chunk of life that’s gone by over the course of the program,” mentioned Dave Abrahamian, Viasat’s vice chairman of Satellite Systems.

“It’s a different world now than when we started the program. Back then, we had a handful of satellites in orbit. Since then, we’ve launched the two ViaSat-3s, we merged with Inmarsat, we’ve got the third one (ViaSat-3) ready to go now. So totally different world, different feeling, and its pretty cool to have been part of it all.”

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A is scheduled for 10:21 a.m. EDT (1421 UTC), the opening of an 85-minute window. The Falcon Heavy rocket will fly on an easterly trajectory upon launch.

Spaceflight Now may have stay protection starting about two hours previous to liftoff.

The forty fifth Weather Squadron forecast a 70 p.c probability for favorable climate throughout Monday’s launch window. Meteorologists mentioned they’re waiting for violations of the cumulus cloud and the floor electrical fields guidelines.

“A Carolina Low is expected to push a weak back door cold front through central Florida early Monday morning,” launch climate officers wrote of their forecast. “With the primary window opening around the time the sea breeze will develop, the position of that frontal boundary will determine if clouds are enhanced over the Spaceport.”

The three boosters SpaceX will fly on the mission are a mixture of previous, new, and model new. The two facet boosters, tail numbers 1072 and 1075, might be flying for a second and twenty second time respectively.

Those will separate from the middle core, tail quantity B1098, and goal landings at Landing Zone 2 (LZ-2) and Landing Zone 40 (LZ-40). The latter of the 2 is adjoining to Space Launch Complex 40 and is to the north of LZ-2.

SpaceX won’t try and get well B1098 and will probably be expended into the Atlantic Ocean, concluding its first and solely flight.

Flying Falcon Heavy

The launch of the ViaSat-3 F3 mission marks the twelfth flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut in 2018. Two of these missions carried ViaSat-3 satellites onboard.

Abrahamian famous that the time for on-orbit commissioning might be shorter than that of the Viasat-3 F2 satellite tv for pc which flew on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. He mentioned orbit elevating to the working place on the 158.55 levels East place alongside the equator will take about two months.



“Falcon Heavy is a more powerful vehicle than Atlas 5 was, so they can put us in a more favorable transfer orbit for the electric propulsion,” Abrahamian mentioned. “So they’re going to drop us off in an orbit, hopefully, that is just below [geostationary Earth orbit] apogee-wise, about 23,000 kilometers perigee-wise, and only about three degrees of inclination. So, it’s a very [electric propulsion]-friendly orbit.”

He mentioned it’s going to take at the least a few months after that to undergo the varied deployment phases on the satellite tv for pc and conduct checkouts earlier than the satellite tv for pc producer, Boeing, fingers the car over to Viasat for operational use.

ViaSat-3 F2, which flew on Atlas 5 in November 2025, remains to be finishing its on orbit checkout and is slated to start operational service within the close to future. We requested Abrahamian if he noticed any challenges or key variations between the work to vertically combine Viasat’s payload versus horizontal integration, since his firm has achieved each.

“If you had asked me that before F2 happened and before all the weather challenges with stacking F2 I would have said no. But now, having been through that and doing this, there’s certainly much more flexibility in not having as many constraints on you when you’re doing horizontal integration,” Abrahamian mentioned. “It presents its own set of challenges when you have to roll out to the pad, align very carefully, to pad infrastructure and then go vertical. So that’s a challenge that Atlas doesn’t have. Each system seems to work for each provider.”

Adding capability

This third and closing satellite tv for pc within the ViaSat-3 constellation will goal its space of protection over the Asia-Pacific area and is meant so as to add multiple Terabit per second (Tbps) of capability to the general Viasat community.

“We have a number of airline customers in the APAC region that are really anxious to get this capacity online so they can start serving their customers better,” Abrahamian mentioned. “Two of the hallmarks of the ViaSat-3 constellation are an enormous quantity of simply absolute capability, but additionally the pliability to place it wherever you want it, everytime you want it.

“So it’s not like a traditional satellite, like a ViaSat-1, or Ka sat, or most of the Inmarsat fleet, where you’ve got a single feed per beam, beam locations are fixed, spectrum allocations are fixed and you might overload one beam over here and another beam doesn’t have anybody in it and you can’t move that capacity.”

Abrahamian mentioned the benefit of those newer satellites is their general flexibility.

“ViaSat-3 because we’re using a phased array technology and our antennas onboard, we can form a beam wherever we need it,” he mentioned. “We can allocate spectrum to it as we need it. We can put multiple beams in an area as needed. So we really don’t have the issue of trapped capacity here. So it’s a matter of following the demand wherever it is, within that spacecraft’s field of view.”