Space Exploration Technologies Corp is preparing for liftoff at 10:01 a.m. EST (1501 GMT) on Saturday from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which was the starting point for 82 space shuttle missions. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket – the company’s Falcon 9 – will attempt a controlled landing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
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Just hours before blastoff, the first ever SpaceX Falcon 9 set to soar to the space station from historic pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the rocket went vertical below delightfully dark skies on the Florida Space Coast.
But far more is at stake than the payload. The pad at 39A hasn’t see much action since the final Shuttle mission in 2011.
Saturday morning’s planned launch will be SpaceX’s first from Florida since a devastating rocket explosion at a neighboring pad last summer.
“I’m a little partial to this pad, as all four of my shuttle flights lifted off from here”, Bob Cabana, a former NASA astronaut and current director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, said during a news conference at the pad on Friday. So the agency paid SpaceX and the other companies to develop private tucking and taxi rockets.
A few hours later Musk tweeted again-another tweet ISRO can not ignore: “Daylight rocket launch & landing at the Cape this weekend”. “We are honored to be allowed to use it”. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, remains bullish that the company will be able to fly humans next year on its commercial crew vehicles, saying her response to a recent government audit predicting another year of delays was, “the hell we won’t”.
“What an awesome use for a great American asset”, Cabana added.
SpaceX is using the KSC launch pad because a fiery explosion destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket on the pad during a static test firing on September 1, 2016 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Sation’s Space Launch Complex 40, which is still undergoing repairs.
The STP-H5 Lightning Imaging Sensor will be mounted to the outside of the space station to help Earth-bound scientists measure the amount, rate, and energy of lightning strikes around the world.
Most of the Dragon’s cargo consists of scientific experiments, including the SAGE III apparatus that will be mounted on the station’s exterior to study Earth’s atmosphere from above.
Initially, the launch wasn’t supposed to take place from 39A. Naturally, it’s no mean feat to send a rocket to space, but missions like this one happen all the time. SpaceX is leasing it from NASA and hopes to begin launching astronauts from there next year. But the launch was pushed back after one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets exploded on the pad at LC40.
SpaceX has since identified the problem that caused the accident – which apparently involved the liquid oxygen carried on board possibly having been cooled too much, enough to cause solid oxygen to form, very likely due to the liquid helium tanks that are stored inside the upper oxygen tank. She declined to say when.
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The launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying an experiment from Knox County students was postponed today.
