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. However, the company’s next mission has the rare return of a Falcon 9 directly to dry land.
Elon Musk’s rocket launcher will launch the Argentine Earth observation satellite Saocom 1B from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Friday night. Two smaller spacecraft, a commercial radar satellite named Sequoia and a water data satellite named Gnomes-1, will also be involved in the trip.
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 Thursday launch was also initially set to take place off the West Coast, but was eventually relocated to Florida and was partially delayed. Covid-19 pandemic.
Liftoff is currently set for 4:19 p.m. PT Friday, after being pushed back one day Thursday due to other delays at Kennedy Space Center.
We would have to return the first stage rocket to Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1), which is only about 7 miles from the launch pad, a little less than 10 minutes after the explosion.
As usual, once a livestream feed is available, we will embed it here, where you can come back and vote about 15 minutes before the launch.
