I’m covering this one quickly, since I missed the launch live, but on Wednesday the 6th of July, SpaceX, after 2 previous failed attempts to launch, finally got Intelsat 35e off the ground and into one of the highest orbits possible for the booster with such a payload. This high initial orbit was to preserve as much fuel as possible on the satellite, to prolong its life, but as a side effect also meant the Falcon 9 it was launched with could not be recovered and as such lacked landing equipment.
I mentioned earlier this was the 3rd launch attempt – the 2 previous attempts ended in aborts just before ignition on July 2nd and 3rd and SpaceX, being cautious, changed the next planned July 4th launch day to the 5th giving them some additional time to check out the booster, and it was this July 5th launch that went fine.
As I said, this is the 3rd launch in 12 days, which is impressive (one from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and 2 from Kennedy Space Center), but if you have boosters in stock and satellites to launch, well, you can keep up such a launch rate; it’s great but it isn’t *that* impressive compared to some elements of NASA history… more on that coming soon though.
Again, I didn’t watch this launch, so I have no commentary – as always, though, I’ll share the webcast which since it is one of the “standard” webcasts is much better than the terrible hosted ones that are used for Dragon flights to the Space Station. Also, the webcast isn’t (as of yet) available on the SpaceX YouTube channel, but I found this copy of it on another channel, so I’ll use that one for now.
Enjoy.