October 7 update: SpaceX is now targeting a launch Friday at 7:06 PM EDT (2306 GMT) to launch the Intelsat G-23/G-24 mission after an automatic abort on October 6. You can watch it above.
SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on its 14th mission on Friday (October 6), and you can watch the event live.
The Falcon 9Topping Intelsat’s Galaxy 33 and Galaxy 34 satellites, it is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Thursday during a 69-minute window that opens at 7:06 p.m. EDT (2306 GMT). Watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly through the company (Opens in a new tab).
If all goes according to plan, the first stage of Falcon 9 will return to Earth and land on a SpaceX A Shortfall of Gravitas drone about 8.5 minutes after launch. The robotic ship will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles off the coast of Florida.
Related: 8 ways SpaceX has transformed spaceflight
This will be the 14th launch and landing of this particular booster, According to the description of the mission of SpaceX (Opens in a new tab). The missile previously helped launch GPS III-3 and Turksat 5A satellites, the Transporter-2 rideshare mission and 10 large batches from SpaceX’s starlink Internet satellites.
Fourteen missions is the current record for the first stage of Falcon 9, Set last month only During the launch he raised the BlueWalker 3 communications satellite and 34 Starlinks.
The task schedule calls for the Galaxy 33 to deploy about 33 minutes after boot and the Galaxy 34 to follow suit five minutes later.
The duo “are the next satellites in Intelsat’s comprehensive Galaxy fleet modernization plan, a new generation of technology that will provide North American Intelsat Media customers with high-performance media distribution capabilities and unparalleled penetration of cable addresses,” Luxembourg-based Intelsat wrote in a statement (Opens in a new tab). “It is critical to Intelsat’s US C-band clearing strategy.”
Friday’s launch will be SpaceX’s third in two days. On Wednesday, the company launched Crew-5 astronaut mission for NASA In addition to a set of 52 Starlink satellites.
The mission was originally supposed to take off on Thursday evening (October 6), but Falcon 9 A spontaneous abortion started shortly (Opens in a new tab) before the planned takeoff.
Mike Wall is the author of “Abroad (Opens in a new tab)Book (Great Grand Publishing House, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrials. Follow him on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab) or on Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
