New Delhi:

At the stroke of midnight on Tuesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)’s most sophisticated communications satellite, which will provide broadband services in remote areas and in-flight Internet in passenger aircraft, will set off for its 34-minute journey into outer space onboard Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Named GSAT N-2 or GSAT 20, the 4,700 kg fully commercial satellite will be launched from Space Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch pad has been hired by SpaceX from the US’ Space Force, a special branch of the country’s armed forces that was created in 2019 to secure its space assets. The mission life of GSAT-N2 is 14 years.

The launch will be broadcast on SpaceX’s account on X. The countdown will commence at 11.46pm on Monday and the lift-off will begin at 12.01 am on Tuesday. In case the launch is interrupted for any reason, it will take place at 3.03 pm on Tuesday. The launch window (within which the launch has to be completed, else the next window is utilised) is roughly one hour and 50 minutes.

This is the first time that ISRO is launching a satellite on a SpaceX rocket through its commercial arm New Space India Limited (NSIL). This is also the first time ISRO has built a satellite that only uses the advanced Ka band frequency – a range of radio frequencies between 27 and 40 gigahertz (GHz), which enables the satellite to have higher bandwidth.

Indian space officials are already stationed at Cape Canaveral ahead of the launch. They have sought a dedicated launch and that there will be no co-passenger satellites on the flight.

For the satellite launch, a standard Falcon 9 B-5 rocket, which is 70 metres long and weighs around 549 tonnes, will likely be used during lift-off. It has been designed as a two-stage rocket – a launch vehicle in which two distinct stages provide propulsion consecutively in order to achieve orbital velocity. The rocket can lift up to 8,300 kg to the geosynchronous transfer orbit and 22,800 kilograms to the low earth orbit.

Falcon 9 is a partially reusable rocket and SpaceX asserts “this will be the 19th flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission. After stage separation, the first stage will land on a drone ship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.”

After the satellite is placed in orbit, India’s Master Control Facility a part of ISRO at Hassan will take control of the satellite and then raise the satellite to its final home 36,000 kilometres above India.

So far, Falcon 9 has been part of 395 launches and has faced just four setbacks, achieving a remarkable success rate of 99%. Experts say that a dedicated launch of a Falcon 9 rocket costs about $70 million on an average.