SpaceX Launches Final Gen 1 OneWeb Satellite on 100th Orbital Flight in 2024 – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX completed the 100th orbital launch of the year for its Falcon family of rockets late Saturday night in California. It reached this first milestone by launching the final batch of OneWeb's first-generation Internet satellites

The mission, named OneWeb Launch #20, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday, October 19 at 10:13 p.m. PDT (1:13 a.m. EDT, 0513 UTC Sunday, October 20).

The Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number B1082 in the SpaceX fleet, was launched for the seventh time for this mission. It previously supported USSF-62 and five Starlink missions.

A little less than eight minutes after liftoff, B1082 returned to Vandenberg for a propulsive touchdown at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4). This marks the 21st booster landing at LZ-4 and the 77th for SpaceX.

The mission capped off a busy week for SpaceX, which also saw the launch of its Starship rocket, a Falcon Heavy rocket and three other Falcon 9 rockets. So far in 2024, SpaceX has launched 98 Falcon 9 rockets and is scheduled to launch its 99th Falcon 9 on Monday, October 21, on the Starlink 6-61 mission from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

OneWeb General 1 Final

OneWeb's journey to cap the first generation of satellite internet constellations has ultimately been anything but a straight line. OneWeb had to approach multiple launch providers to complete the constellation of 634 satellites by launch 19 on May 20, 2023.

Its original plan for the Gen 1 constellation was to have 648 satellites in orbit. 20 satellites aboard Launch #20 would put it above that threshold.

The first batch of six satellites was launched on February 27, 2019, on a Soyuz rocket, which lifted off from French Guiana. The company had hoped to begin monthly launches in January 2020, but launch #2 did not occur until February 2020, when 34 satellites were launched on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome.

While the third launch took place about a month later out of Baikonur, the fourth launch from Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome was delayed until December 2020 due to OneWeb's bankruptcy issues and subsequent acquisition by Bharti Global, an Indian company, and the UK government.

The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth launches took place at Bhastachani on 25 March, 25 April, 27 May and 1 July respectively. Launch #9 saw its return to Baikonur on August 22, 2021, adding 34 more satellites to bring the total to 288 in orbit at that time.

Launch #10 lifts off from Baikonur on September 14, 2021, to Vostochny for launch #11 on October 14, 2021, back to Baikonur for launch #12 on December 27, 2021, and then to France for launch #13 Return to Guyana on February 10, 2022.

However, OneWeb encounters a major obstacle en route to the planned launch #14 mission With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb announced the suspension of its relationship with Roscosmos just days before the planned March 2022 launch. Satellites for that mission remain in Russia today.

“OneWeb's board has voted to suspend all launches from Baikonur,” OneWeb said in a brief statement at the time. The company was not happy to lose its launch provider, as it will complete its constellation of six more Soyuz rockets under contract with Arianespace to fly aboard.

Later in March, OneWeb announced launch agreements with both SpaceX and the Indian Space Research Organization to launch the remaining satellites on three Falcon 9 rockets and two Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) rockets.

These Falcon 9 launches took place on December 8, 2022, January 10, 2023, and March 9, 2023, (#15, #16, and #17 launches, respectively) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, where the satellites are manufactured at the Airbus OneWeb Satellite Facility on Merritt Island. is

ISRO completed launches #14 and #18 on October 22, 2022 and March 25, 2023 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.

OneWeb then announced in May 2023 that it plans to launch 16 more satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Mission #19, including a demonstration satellite for its Gen 2 fleet called “JoySat”.

“Developed through the European Space Agency and UKSA Sunrise Partnership Program, JoeySat carries an innovative payload design that will demonstrate digital regenerative processing, electronically steered multi-beam arrays, and digital beamforming and beam-hopping technologies,” OneWeb wrote at the time. “These capabilities, designed for OneWeb's Gen 2 constellation, will provide customers with greater flexibility and capability, optimizing resources to manage real-time increases in commercial demand or enable rapid response to emergencies such as natural disasters.”

Since that launch, OneWeb entered into a partnership with Eutelsat to form the Eutelsat Group, combining the company's low Earth orbit and geostationary Earth orbit satellite capabilities.