You might make your way to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, to see it happen in person. Tonight’s launch is scheduled to go off at 6:27 p.m. Launch window opens at 6:27pm EDT, 10:27pm UTC. But this time, it’s different: SpaceX is going all the way to space to put a satellite called the SES-10 into orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth for a paying customer.įalcon 9 and SES-10 vertical on Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39A. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, for example, has re-flown rockets at not-quite-outer-space altitude for testing purposes. Weather update: SpaceX targeting second booster landing at Cape. Weather forecast is 60 'go' at Launch Complex 40. The window will remain open for 11 minutes - or until 6:22 p.m. Some companies have made limited progress with reusable rockets in the past. It's Launch Day Here's what you need to know for this evening's SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station: Liftoff is set for 6:11 p.m. The aim is to make rockets more like airplanes they fly, land, refuel, and fly again. As rockets are big and expensive, SpaceX aims to significantly reduce the costs of space travel by getting multiple uses out of the same hardware. Reusable rockets have been central to the company’s business plan since it was founded in 2002. The rocket taking off tonight is the same one that famously made an upright landing on a floating barge in 2016.
The company has produced a series of guidelines for viewing, including the map below.Īlso check out its annotated series of Google Earth screenshots outlining the path of the rocket and its potential visibility at different points on the East Coast in and around Virginia and Washington, DC.MORE: A GoPro Captures a SpaceX Rocket's Plummet Back to Earth Read article The LADEE launch marks Virginia-based Orbital's first rocket launch carrying a payload destined for a spot beyond a low-Earth orbit. That makes Earth's moon ripe for types of data collection that could open up new understandings into other planetary bodies and their atmospheres. It exists around Mercury, as well as other large moons and asteroids. That portion of atmosphere - which the Earth has, but which is out of reach beyond the orbit of the International Space Station - also happens to be the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system, explains 's Miriam Kramer.
The moon's boundary surface exosphere, as it's called, has been left relatively undisturbed thanks to a low number of probe landings of late. Scientists posit that the mysterious moondust is tied to the moon's atmosphere and its interactions with the surface environment, but they've been unable to study the phenomenon thoroughly in the nearly 50 years since the Surveyor 7 mission. Back then, unexplainable "streamers" of light were noticed on the horizon of the Earth's natural satellite before sunrise. Weather is >90 favorable for tonight’s Falcon 9 launch of COSMO-SkyMed. The goal of the $280 million mission, pronounced "laddie," is to investigate unknowns surrounding the moon's atmosphere that were brought up by NASA's Surveyor 7 mission in 1968. The company has tried to send up its Falcon 9 rocket since Thursday but has kept pushing it back because of the weather.
The launch is the first to take place at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., and will be visible to a wide array of East Coast onlookers lucky enough to catch a patch of clear sky.įor those not on the East Coast - or anyone looking for a front row ticket to the rocket launch itself - NASA TV will broadcast the event live starting at 9:30 p.m.
ET, NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) onboard an Orbital-made Minotaur V rocket. If the typical bevy of Friday night activities seems just too boring to bear, try out a rocket launch instead.Īt roughly 11:27 p.m.