VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (KEYT) - A Falcon 9 launch of the Space Development Agency's Tranche 1 mission has been scheduled for Wednesday, Sep. 10 at 7:12 a.m. local time.
A backup launch time has been designated for the following day, Thursday, Sep. 11 at 7:04 a.m. shared SpaceX.
A live webcast of the launch will begin about ten minutes before liftoff that you can watch here or on SpaceX's Twitter/X account.
The Tranche 1 mission will add space vehicles to the existing layered network of supporting elements for tactical communications and missile tracking for the U.S. military from a low-Earth orbit detailed the Space Development Agency.
The federal agency has launched previous missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base setting up the constellation of low-Earth satellites and delivery vehicles in launches in April and August of 2023.
Those initial launches consisted of under 30 satellites, but the Space Development Agency intends to field anywhere from 300 to over 500 satellites of various sizes with an expectation that when fully operational, 95 percent of the Earth would have at least two satellites in view and 99 percent of surface locations around the globe would have at least one satellites.
"Historically, the Department of Defense has been investing in billion-dollar Battlestar Galacticas that are big juicy targets," said the Director of the Space Force's Space Development Agency, Derek Tournear in 2023. "We wanted to go to an architecture that gave us resilience against threats and that we could upgrade rapidly every two years."
The Department of Defense currently uses about ten missile defense satellites operating in a geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of about 22,000 miles, but the far smaller Tranche mission satellites will operate at a lower altitude of approximately 600 miles above the Earth.
"As threats to space expand, we can no longer rely on a strategy of putting most of our capabilities into these few large exquisite satellite systems," explained Kari Bingen, Director of the Aerospace Security Project at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Now the DOD [Department of Defense] is taking the approach of building many systems on shorter timelines."
Following first-stage separation, the Falcon 9 booster assigned to this mission will return to Earth to land on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship awaiting in the Pacific Ocean.
A depicition of that launch sequence is show in the image below courtesy of SpaceX.
There is a possibility that people across the region may hear one or more sonic booms associated with the launch, but how far the sound reaches will depend on weather and other factors at launch time.
This will be the sixth flight for the Falcon 9 assigned to this mission which previously launched five Starlink missions.