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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

Weather Looks Good for Bold SpaceX Launch on Saturday: Watch Live

• http://www.space.com-Mike Wall

Weather forecasters are predicting an 80 percent chance of good conditions Saturday morning at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the company's unmanned Dragon capsule from the Cape at 4:47 a.m. EST (0947 GMT) Saturday; you can watch the SpaceX launch live on Space.com beginning at 3:30 a.m. EST (0830 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV.

Getting Dragon aloft is the main goal Saturday, but a secondary objective has captured a good deal more attention. SpaceX aims to bring the Falcon 9's first stage back to Earth for a precision landing on an "autonomous spaceport drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean. [Inside SpaceX's Epic Fly-Back Reusable Rocket Landing (Infographic)]

The bold and unprecedented maneuver is part of SpaceX's ongoing effort to develop fully and rapidly reusable rockets, which the company's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, has said could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100.

Musk gave the rocket-landing attempt just a 50 percent chance of success. But he has also stressed that, whatever the outcome Saturday, the company will keep working until it's able to set a rocket down softly on land and then refly it.


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