Article Image

IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

SpaceX Will Try Again to Launch Satellite and Land a Rocket Today

• Space.com

The Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX is targeting a 6:35 p.m. EST (2335 GMT) blastoff from a pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for its unmanned Falcon 9 rocket. You can watch a webcast of the launch live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, which is offering two different video streams of the event. On board the Falcon 9 rocket will be the SES-9 communications satellite, which SpaceX plans to deliver to geostationary transfer orbit for Luxembourg-based customer SES. SpaceX will also attempt to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on its drone ship, dubbed "Of Course I Still Love You." SpaceX has made several attempts to land on this automated platform, with no success. These attempts are related to the long-term goal of SpaceX (and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk) to develop a completely reusable launch system that could dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight. So far, SpaceX has managed a controlled rocket landing on land, in December 2015.


AzureStandard