This Week Ahead in Launches: Virgin Galactic returns to flight and more from SpaceX and Rocket Lab

This week is pretty exciting, with lots of activity from multiple companies and nations preparing to launch. However, the bigger story of the week will be Virgin Galactic’s return to powered flight with its VSS Unity spaceplane, its first powered flight since 2021.

This Week’s Launches

• May 23
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 Arabist 7B (Badr 8), 11:25 P.M. ET
    • SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
• May 24
  • Roscosmos Soyuz Progress 84P, 8:56 A.M. ET
    • Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakstan
• May 25
  • Rocket Lab Electron TROPICS 5&6, 12:00 A.M. ET
    • LC-1, Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand
  • Virgin Galactic VSS Unity Unity 25, 8:00 A.M. ET
    • Spaceport America, New Mexico
• May (No dates given yet)
  • China Long March 2F Shenzhou 16
    • Jiuquan, China
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink Group 2-9
    • SLC-4E, Vandenberg Space Force Base, California

Virgin Galactic returning to powered flight

Virgin Galactic is preparing to have the hopefully final test flight of its commercial spaceflight system this week. This flight will have a crew of six, two pilots and four passengers, with some new flyers and others returning for another launch experience.

The suborbital flight comes after over a year-long process of refurbishing and upgrading VSS Unity, the rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane, and White Knight Two, the purpose-built aircraft that carries USS Unity high into the atmosphere. If all is successful, VSS Unity’s next flight will carry commercial customers.

Rocket Lab completing TROPICS constellation

On Thursday, just barely, Rocket Lab is preparing to launch the next two TROPICS satellites for NASA to complete the constellation. Designed to track and study developing hurricanes, this constellation plans to be ready before the 2023 season begins, giving meteorologists a new swath of data to prepare models and projections of these massive storms.

TROPICS has had a troubled life. The first two satellites failed to reach orbit after a failure on an Astra rocket last year. Astra eventually ditched the Rocket 3 design and moved to a larger vehicle meaning the final four satellites needed a new ride. Rocket Lab was there to help, successfully delivering TROPICS 3 and 4 into their orbits about two weeks ago. Now the fifth and sixth satellites are ready to join them to help start their mission.

Possible two launches from SpaceX to bump launch rate

Depending on when you start the week, for this series, we’re starting on Mondays, only two launches for SpaceX is rather calm for the company. However, throughout the week, SpaceX will also monitor two Dragon spacecraft docked to the ISS, with Axiom-2‘s Dragon preparing to return home at the beginning of next week.

SpaceX’s first launch is given and set for Tuesday. The telecommunications satellite will launch into a geostationary transfer orbit with the first stage booster landing on the droneship Just Read The Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean. The second mission hasn’t been formally confirmed yet, but we expect to see Starlink Group 2-9 launch by the end of May, next Wednesday. So a good chance that we could liftoff from SLC-4E in California sometime this week.

SpaceX is on a mission to launch 100 Falcon rockets this year, which means they need to be launching one rocket every four days. Actually, they need to do it less than every four days, close to every three and a half days. Last week SpaceX did a great job at that by launching several commercial and Starlink missions in just a few days. However, the company is still behind the needed launch cadence.