A Rocket Lab Electron booster will fly the third of three missions for Tokyo-based Synspective – a global satellite imaging and monitoring company – at 20:30 UTC today, September 15, 2022. This translates to 8:30 a.m. Friday NZST or 3:30 p.m. today CDT. The launch will fly from the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The company, continuing its tradition of mission names intended to catch the imagination, is calling this one The Owl Spreads Its Wings.
The Strix-1 satellite is the first craft of what will eventually be a worldwide synthetic radar system able to detect millimeter-sized changes in Earth’s surface. The flight will mark a handful of launch milestones for the small aerospace company.
This artist’s concept depicts a Synspective StriX mapping satellite in orbit. A StriX will launch at 20:30 UTC on Thursday, September 15, 2022, from New Zealand aboard a Rocket Lab Electron booster craft. The launch will be streamed live and can be viewed via this page. Image via Synspective.
SpaceX also launching today
Also taking to orbit today, if the weather cooperates, is another batch of Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9 lift vehicle launching at 01:27 UTC on September 16 (9:27 p.m. EDT on September 15) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Following a pair of weather delays, this will be a third – hopefully final – attempt to get this mission off the ground this week.
Mission Starlink 4-34 includes 54 more of the company’s communications networking satellites. The large total number of satellites the company intends to launch, along with their relative brightness, have become a cause for advocates of preserving the globe’s dark skies.
Bottom line: Two launches scheduled for today (September 15, 2022) are Rocket Lab Electron and SpaceX Falcon 9. Both are attempting to create globe-spanning satellite networks.
Award-winning reporter and editor Dave Adalian’s love affair with the cosmos began during a long-ago summer school trip to the storied and venerable Lick Observatory atop California’s Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose in the foggy Diablos Mountain Range and far above Monterey Bay at the edge of the endless blue Pacific Ocean. That field trip goes on today, as Dave still pursues his nocturnal adventures, perched in the darkness at his telescope’s eyepiece or chasing wandering stars through the fields of night as a naked-eye observer. A lifelong resident of California’s Tulare County – an agricultural paradise where the Great San Joaquin Valley meets the Sierra Nevada in endless miles of grass-covered foothills – Dave grew up in a wilderness larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, one choked with the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the US, one which passes its nights beneath pitch black skies rising over the some of highest mountain peaks and greatest roadless areas on the North American continent. Dave studied English, American literature and mass communications at the College of the Sequoias and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked as a reporter and editor for a number of news publications on- and offline during a career spanning nearly 30 years so far. His fondest literary hope is to share his passion for astronomy and all things cosmic with anyone who wants to join in the adventure and explore the universe’s past, present and future.
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