SpaceX launched their 27th mission of the year on June 28 at 21:04 UTC. A Falcon 9 1073 lifted SES-22 into Geostationary Transfer Orbit, GTO, from SLC-40 in Florida.

Most Falcon 9 missions end 10-15 minutes after launch, but SES-22’s GTO orbit required quite a long coast phase to do the next second stage burn at the equator, so the mission ended with payload separation 28 minutes into the flight, with the host signing off while the satellite was visible floating away from the upper stage cameras.

Booster 1073 successfully completed its second landing on A Shortfall of Gravitas ten minutes into the flight.

SES-22 is an interesting satellite in comparison to the large crowd of other geostationary communications satellites. It has transponders that use C-band – between 3.7 to 4.2 Gigahertz – and not Ka, Ku, or X-band like other satellites. C-band was the first band that satellite communications were authorized to use. The other bands came later after technology improved because the higher frequencies are more easily blocked by precipitation.

The reason this particular satellite uses this bandwidth is the subject of a lot of politics and drama. What you need to know is that several geostationary satellite operators worked with the Federal Communications Commission – the government agency responsible for frequency assignments – to give up some 280 megahertz of their C bandwidth so terrestrial operators could use those frequencies in 5G cell phone towers across more of the US.

SES-22’s cousins, SES-20 and 21, are of a different satellite design but also with C-band payloads and will launch together on an Atlas V later this year. SES-18 and 19 will do the same on a Falcon 9 in the same time period.

More Information

Thales Alenia Space press release

SES-22 mission page (SpaceX)