“You’re going to see the same thing that you saw last time”, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability at SpaceX.
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Residents may wish to follow the company’s launch webcast for real time information concerning Monday’s launch. Eastern on Monday, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Among the goodies that the rocket will be ferrying to space is something called an International Docking Adapter (IDA). This would have converted the existing APAS-95 docking interface to the new NASA Docking System or “NDS”. Right now, only Russian spacecrafts can dock with the ISS. It will hopefully push space exploration and travel into a less rigid, more open climate, Inverse reports. It will carry an important piece of hardware to the space station, one of two planned new docking ports that will enable private space taxis to hook up with the space station.
After blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 12:45 am (0445 GMT), SpaceX will attempt to return the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to an upright landing on solid ground at the NASA facility.
In June 2015, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded about two minutes after launch, destroying a previous version of the docking adapter and thousands of pounds of gear.
By the latter part of June, the first stage was wrapped in its black, protective transport attire and taken under security escort across the southern portion of the United States to the launch site.
To date, SpaceX has conducted six Falcon 9 launches this year.
SpaceX has successfully recovered first-stage rockets from three missions at sea using the company’s Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ships.
The reinforced concrete landing pad at the former Launch Complex 13, which measures about 280 feet in diameter, offers a larger and more stable target than the ship as the rocket drops from more than 80 miles up.
As of today, there’s a 90 percent chance the weather will be favorable enough for the mission to proceed within the launch window.
“The size of the IDA necessitates that it will fly in the Dragon trunk…we looked on whether it could fly on an HTV (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s cargo freighter)”. We spent a lot of time discussing the FSE (Flight Support Equipment) required, understanding more about the trunk, the limitations of the trunk and we developed what we call an Interface Configuration Document that established the loads, how IDA would sit in this trunk, what kind of special support equipment was needed to balance the loads.
Monday’s launch will be the 27th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket, and the 32nd space launch attempt by SpaceX in its history.
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 family of boosters consist of two stages and burn a mixture of liquid oxygen (LOX) and rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1).
