SpaceX will launch two satellites for telecommunications company SES today (April 28) and land a rocket in the ocean, weather permitting, and you’ll be able to watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying SES’s O3b mPower 3 and 4 satellites will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida during an 88-minute window on Friday at 5:12 p.m. EDT (2112 GMT).
Courtesy of SpaceX or watch it live on Space.com Directly through the company (opens in new tab). The webcast is expected to begin 15 minutes prior to kickoff.
That schedule assumes good weather, however, Mother Nature may not cooperate. In fact, forecasts call for a 20% chance of good conditions in time for Friday’s launch, SpaceX said via Twitter yesterday (opens in new tab) (April 27). If Friday’s attempt is scrubbed, a backup chance opens up on Saturday (April 29) with the same 88-minute window.
Related: 8 Ways SpaceX Changed Space Travel
If all goes as planned, Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth within nine minutes of liftoff today. It will come in for a vertical touch down with the SpaceX droneship Just Read The Instructions stationed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
A step is the second liftoff and touchdown for this particular booster SpaceX mission description (opens in new tab). It previously launched Crew-6, SpaceX’s most recent space mission, to the International Space Station for NASA.
The upper stage of Falcon 9, meanwhile, will tow O3b mPower 3 and 4 to medium Earth orbit. Both satellites are scheduled to be launched two hours after launch, seven minutes apart.
As their names suggest, the two satellites launched today will become the third and fourth members of SES’s O3b mPower constellation, which will provide low-latency communications services to customers around the word, according to SES, based in Luxembourg and France.
The 11-satellite network is assembled at an altitude of 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers). Two satellites already exist – O3b mPower 1 and 2, which were launched on a Falcon 9 last December. It was the 200th orbital flight for SpaceX since its founding in 2002, a major mission.
SpaceX will have today’s liftoff on the 29th of 2023, with more to come soon. In fact, the agency will launch its powerful Falcon Heavy rocket for the sixth time this evening, weather permitting. (It’s also scheduled to fly from Florida’s Space Coast.)
By Mike Wall “outside (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelWall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) Or Facebook (opens in new tab).
