A first stage of Falcon 9 to be seen at Cape Canaveral Landing Zone 1.
SpaceX
It’s become routine to explode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida and then see the first-step booster return for a soft landing aboard an autonomous coastal drone in the coast. Atlantic Ocean. An upcoming mission, however, is the rare return of a Falcon 9 directly to the dry land.
Elon Musk’s rocket launcher will launch the Argentine satellite Saocom 1B from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the coming days. The launch was originally scheduled for Thursday, however delay in unrelated launch of a spy satellite of Cape Canaveral have had a ripple effect that has also led to the postponement of this mission. A new launch date is expected to be announced soon.
As it descends from the ground, two smaller spacecraft, a commercial radar satellite called Sequoia and a value satellite called Gnomes-1, will also be on the run.
SpaceX has made only one other landing off the ground in the past 12 months mission reloaded to the International Space Station on March 7. Several factors consider when landing SpaceX as on a droneship, a critical one is the trajectory of the flight and how far the rocket is from the shore once it has been separated from the second-stage rocket.
As NASASpaceflight.com reported last year, Saocom 1B will take off and fly on a polar orbit toward the South Pole. After launch, the Falcon 9 will rock the coast of Florida, allowing it to attempt landing from the ground path. This will mark the first launch direction from Florida to use this southern polar corridor since 1960.
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The SpaceX launch of companion satellite Saocom 1A in 2018 was also on display a ground pad landing, but at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This launch was initially also introduced from the West Coast, but was eventually relocated to Florida and delayed in part thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
After deploying Saocom 1B, we would have to return the first-stage rocket to Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1), which is only about 7 kilometers from the launch site, a little less than 10 minutes later the breakdown.
As usual we will once again add a start date and livestream feed available here.
