Powerhouse hurricane watchdog satellite launches aboard SpaceX Falcon Heavy
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The last of a series of hurricane-hunting satellites got its most powerful ride ever to space Tuesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
The rocket that is essentially three Falcon 9’s strapped together blasted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at 5:26 p.m. Eastern time carrying the 11,000-pound GOES-U satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, partnered with NASA.
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With 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, Falcon Heavy bested the power of the ULA Atlas V rockets that gave a ride to the previous three GOES satellites.
“This is an incredibly high energy orbit that necessitates an incredibly powerful rocket to get there,” said SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman, director of its NASA Science Missions program. She said SpaceX worked with NASA’s launch services and Lockheed Martin, which built the GOES satellite, to optimize its propellant over its lifetime.
“The number of years our normal spacecraft specification lifetime is 15 years. With the added capability that the Falcon Heavy is giving us we expect to be 20 plus years of life — fuel life,” said NOAA GOES program manager Pam Sullivan.
It’s the 19th Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) launched since 1975, but the last of four in the GOES-R series that launched in 2016, 2018 and 2022.
“(GOES-R) ushered in a new and transformative era of advanced Earth monitoring technologies to ever orbit in space,” said Steve Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “Our National Weather Service colleagues tell us that this technology has since changed the game for weather prediction.”
GOES-U, like the previous 18 GOES satellites, will change names once it reaches space and become GOES-19. It will then spend the next year getting into place in geostationary orbit so it can take over the role and inherit the title of the NOAA’s GOES-East satellite. GOES-R, that became GOES-16, currently is tasked with that role, looking at the Atlantic basin.
There’s also a GOES-West parked in space looking at the Pacific and a spare GOES satellite in case one of the two were to malfunction.
“It’ll be looking at the entire Western Hemisphere once every 10 minutes, the entire U.S. every five minutes,” Sullivan said. “It’s zooming in and doing what we call smaller mesoscale areas as frequently as every 30 seconds.”
A new instrument on board called the compact coronagraph will look away from Earth toward the sun to track coronal mass ejections that can threaten the planet’s electrical and communications grids.
National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan says live GOES satellite images blanket its headquarters.
“Oh, it’s constant. It’s always there,” he said. We have multiple computer monitors that always have satellite imagery on them. So we’re looking at just auto updates of every image — visible, infrared, water vapor. It’s constantly there.”
He said it’s the NHC’s first line of defense and invaluable for systems farther out before Hurricane Hunter aircraft can reach them, and the four satellites from the GOES-R series were a huge improvement over the previous series.
