SpaceX launches one of its most complex missions ever – Spaceflight Now

Abel Avalon, President and CEO of AST Spacemobile, said in a statement. This revolutionary technology supports our mission to close the connectivity gap faced by today’s more than 5 billion mobile subscribers and bring mobile broadband to nearly half of the world’s unconnected population. We want to bridge the gap between rich and poor.

The Bluewalker 3 Falcon 9 payload is located in the canopy. The top of the Falcon 9 will fire up two engines before launching the approximately 3,300-pound (1.5-ton) Bluewalker 3 satellite to an altitude of approximately 318 miles (513 miles). Kilometre). Bluewalker 3 will disconnect approximately 50 minutes after launch.

Two more engines on the Falcon 9’s upper plane will put the rocket into a slightly lower orbit, allowing the 34 Starlink satellites to deploy in about T+ plus 2 hours and 4 minutes. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, said Saturday night’s launch will be “one of our most complex missions.”

“Bluewalker 3 will be the largest commercial communications suite ever built in low-Earth orbit,” said Scott Wisniewski, chief strategy officer of AST Spacemobile. It measures 693 square feet and was designed to test mobile broadband technology live.

“We are a company founded on a desire to build mobile broadband straight from space,” Wisniewski said. “We’ve been doing this since 2017. These satellites are designed to communicate directly with cell phones, regular cell phones and unmodified phones on the ground, and we’ll be testing them over the coming months.”

Assuming Bluewalker 3 works well, for the first few months after launch, ground controllers will send commands to the spacecraft to launch its antenna array. According to Wisniewski, the antenna consists of 148 separate sections, each with its own antenna element, connected by mechanical hinges.

“The identification process itself is very simple,” Wisniewski said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “Essentially, we compress the satellite into a cube and make it appear in two dimensions using the energy stored in the hinges that hold it together. What is exposed is a bundle of antenna elements descending towards Earth and the solar elements ascending towards the Sun.”

“The key to any implementation is to make it as simple and foolproof as possible,” says Wisniewski. “What the James Webb Telescope has achieved is truly extraordinary. But this level of complexity creates the potential for error, in our opinion. And if you can avoid it, you will. We’ve had many more complicated designs over the years and there will be many great ways to do this in the future. But in the end, a simple mechanical hinge is the best way to eliminate the risk.

“For us, disclosure will be…an important milestone,” Wisniewski said. “And then we do the calibration and then we start making calls.”

AST Spacemobile is backed by venture capital funds and investments from Vodafone, mobile operator American Tower and Japanese mobile operator Rakuten. The company has signed agreements with Samsung, Nokia and mobile operators such as Vodafone, AT&T and Orange to test the compatibility of satellite mobile networks with existing mobile phones.

Bluewalker 3 will showcase SpaceMobile’s AST technology with more than 10 mobile network operators on six continents. “Our goal is to calibrate their network so that we can communicate with them,” Wisniewski said.

If all goes well, the company plans to launch its first five operational satellites by the end of 2023, potentially on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. AST Spacemobile plans to eventually deploy 168 satellites.

“This is part of our plan to build 168 satellites worldwide,” Wisniewski said.