SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches massive EchoStar internet satellite

With an ever-increasing demand for internet access, EchoStar launched a powerful new communications satellite late Friday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket that will deliver broadband service across nearly 80% of North and South America.

Running two days later after a last-minute scrub Wednesday, the Falcon Heavy's first stage, made up of three strapped-together Falcon 9 boosters, roared to life with a sky-lighting burst of flaming exhaust at 11:04 p.m. Eastern time.

An instant later, with its 27 engine generating more than five million pounds of thrust, the rocket majestically climbed away from historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, putting on a spectacular overnight show for area residents and tourists as it arced away to the east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Two-and-a-half minutes later, the two side boosters, making their third flight each, peeled away, reversed course and flew back to the launch site, carrying out equally spectacular side-by-side landings at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as shotgun-like sonic booms rumbled across the Space Coast.

The central core stage, meanwhile, was discarded a few moments after the side boosters departed, and the flight continued on the power of the single engine powering the Falcon Heavy's second stage. Three upper stage engine firings over the next three-and-a-half hours were required to reach the planned deploy orbit.

If all goes well, the Jupiter 3 satellite's on-board thrusters will circularize the orbit at an altitude of 22,300 miles above the equator at 95 degrees west longitude. At that "geosynchronous" altitude, the satellite will take 24 hours to complete one orbit, appearing stationary above the western hemisphere.

Tipping the scales at more than nine tons, Jupiter 3, also known as EchoStar 24, is believed to be the heaviest commercial communications satellite ever launched. With solar panels stretching 127 feet from tip to tip, the bus-size satellite will provide broadband service through EchoStar's subsidiary, Hughes Network Systems. Xplorenet Communications, a long-time Hughes partner, will provide service across Canada.

EchoStar's satellites represent an alternative approach to space-based internet, using a few, very powerful high-altitude data relay stations as opposed to thousands of small low-Earth orbit satellites like SpaceX's Starlink system and Amazon's planned Kuiper satellites.

The low-altitude systems provide high speeds and low latency, passing off a user's internet activity from one satellite to another as they streak overhead. Geosynchronous satellites are much farther away and signals take longer to traverse the distance. But no handoffs are required and multiple beams deliver relatively fast service to high-demand areas.

"A geostationary satellite is proven, it's time-tested and they're great at laying down dense broadband capacity right where our customers need it the most," Sharyn Nerenberg, EchoStar vice president of corporate communications, told Spaceflight Now.

"Jupiter 3 was designed to do exactly that. It was custom designed to lay down the most capacity possible where we know our customers really need it."

It's designed to do that with 300 steerable "spot beams" that can deliver broadband access to targeted locations across North and South America where demand is highest, shifting beams from point to point as traffic requires.

"Deploying these very small, densely concentrated spot beams allows us to target capacity in the specific areas where our customers need it most," according to EchoStar's web site.

"With coverage from Canada, across the U.S., Brazil and throughout South America, Jupiter 3 will expand the reach of our HughesNet satellite internet service to nearly 80 percent of the population across the Americas."

Built by Maxar, Jupiter 3 will join two less powerful Jupiter-series satellites already in orbit. The new satellite has a capacity of more than 500 gigabytes per second, delivering up to a gigabyte per spot beam and 100 megabytes per second to end users.

Friday's launching was just the seventh of a Falcon Heavy and the third so far this year. The heavy-lift rocket's most recent previous launch on April 30 put another geosynchronous broadband satellite into orbit -- ViaSat-3.1 -- but that spacecraft's huge mesh antenna failed to fully deploy and the relay station may be a total loss.

In:
• Starlink
• Elon Musk
• SpaceX

William Harwood

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia."

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