Spaceflight Now by Stephen Clark August 31, 2020
Vaulting away from Cape Canaveral on an unusual southerly trajectory, a Falcon 9 rocket dodged stormy weather and successfully placed an Argentine radar observation satellite into an orbit over Earth’s poles Sunday on SpaceX’s 100th launch.
Range safety officials studied whether the the southerly launch trajectory from Florida might be resurrected after wildfires at Vandenberg Air Force Base — the primary U.S. polar orbit launch site in California — threatened launch and payload processing facilities in 2016.
It turned out SpaceX’s ability to return first stage boosters to controlled landings — rather than having them plummet unguided back to Earth downrange — and the Falcon 9’s use of autonomous flight safety system made the polar launch trajectory from Cape Canaveral feasible.
“What we came up with after we analyzed is SpaceX should be able to do it because of two things,†said Wayne Monteith, associate administrator of the FAA’s office of commercial space transportation. “No. 1, booster flyback, and No. 2, even more important, is autonomous flight safety because going south, the way the architecture of the command destruct systems are set up terrestrially, you’d be looking right up the plume, and you get signal attenuation, and you may not be able to … send command destruct.
“So with autonomous flight safety and booster flyback, we were able to provide for them what appeared to be a notional safe corridor from a safety perspective,†said Monteith, a former commander of the 45th Space Wing.
More:
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/08/31/spacex-launches-first-polar-orbit-mission-from-florida-in-decades/
