After a beautiful and successful late night launch on Friday, the SpaceX Dragon 1 cargo capsule arrived to the International Space Station on Monday, March 9, 2020 after performing on orbit maneuvers to catch up to the station over the course of two days.
SpaceX launched their Dragon 1 cargo capsule full of supplies and bound for the International Space Station for the final time on March 6, 2020 at approximately 11:50pm EST from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as part of their CRS-20 mission supporting NASA's Commercial Resupply Services Phase 1 contract.
As early as March 2020, SpaceX is planning to launch SAOCOM-1B on one of their Falcon 9 rockets while doing something that nobody has done in over 50 years!
SpaceX successfully launched another set of 60 of their version 1.0 operational Starlink Satellites into low earth orbit on Monday, February 17, 2020 at 10:05am EST (15:05 UTC). The primary mission appears to have been another major success for SpaceX's Starlink program, however, their secondary experimental recovery missions suffered some unfortunate failures for both the Falcon 9's first stage booster landing attempt at sea on their autonomous spaceport droneship, Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY); as well as for their attempts to recover both halves of their protective payload fairings which they attempted to gently land under parachute at sea, aboard their support vessels GO Ms. Tree and GO Ms. Chief.
SpaceX launched another set of 60 version 1.0 operational Starlink Satellites into low earth orbit on January 29, 2020 at 9:06am EST (14:06 UTC). The first stage booster for this mission previously supported and launched their first Crew Dragon demonstration flight, DM-1, into orbit along with the RADARSAT mission in June 2019. The first stage booster was successfully recovered 630 kilometers downrange on their autonomous spaceport droneship, Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY).
SpaceX is ready for a major demonstration with their Crew Dragon In-Flight Abort Test, a major milestone before SpaceX begins flying astronauts.
At first glance the test seemed pretty successful but it didn't quite go exactly to plan. The camerawork here was enough to make you want to bang your head against the wall but aside from that you may have noticed that I said three main parachutes and clearly the Starliner Descended under only two main parachutes. This was in fact an anomaly and was not supposed to happen.
SpaceX is in a little bit of a lull right now and it's actually it's not really a bad thing for SpaceX. They're actually in the unusual situation where they are ready before their customers are actually ready with their payloads. Still on track for 2019 we've got a couple of communication satellites that are still going to launch, we've got another resupply mission to the International Space Station that's scheduled for December, we've got a whole bunch of Starship and Super Heavy developments that are happening as well as potential Starship flights as early as next month and then we also have the In-Flight abort test and DM-2 missions for Crew Dragon that they're still trying to fit in for this year.
