SpaceX and Rocket Lab are planning to launch two back-to-back missions on Friday and Saturday, and you can watch them live online.
The space event begins on Friday (1 April) with SpaceX The launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, which will carry 40 satellites into orbit for a variety of customers, weather permitting. Liftoff is set at 12:24 PM EDT (1624 GMT).
Forecasts currently expect there will only be a 30% chance of good enough weather to take off, SpaceX tweeted on Thursday (31 March). SpaceX is already routinely reusing rockets, and its Friday mission, called Transporter 4, will continue that trend.
The first stage of Falcon 9 will return to a land Shortly after takeoff and landing on an autonomous drone stationed in the Atlantic, if all goes according to plan. The first stage of Friday’s Falcon 9 flight already has six launches and landings under its belt, According to the job description.
Related: SpaceX missile development
On Saturday (April 2), less than 24 hours after SpaceX launched, a rocket lab The Electron vehicle is now scheduled to launch two Earth observation satellites of the US company BlackSky at 8:10 a.m. EDT (1210 GMT) from the Rocket Lab site in New Zealand.
Rocket Lab initially planned to launch the mission on Friday, but announced the flight delay late Thursday.
“Now targeting April 02 for launch to avoid bad weather,” Rocket Lab Wrote in Twitter update.
The launch of Rocket Lab, dubbed “Without Mission a Beat,” will be the 25th Electron launch overall. If all goes according to plan, the number of satellites delivered into orbit by California-based Rocket Lab will rise to 112, According to the company’s mission description.
Rocket Lab is making Electron’s two-stage first stage reusable, lowering boosters for ocean splash and recovery operations on many previous missions. However, there will be no such activities in “Without a Win Mission”.
The Friday and Saturday launches are part of a very busy and exciting weekend for space lovers. Friday also marks the start of NASA’s three-day “wet dress rehearsal” Artemis 1 The mission, which will use a massive rocket from the Space Launch System (SLS) to send an unmanned Orion capsule around the moon.
during the wet rehearsal, members of the Artemis 1 team will undergo several pre-launch procedures, including fueling the SLS. If all goes well with testing, Artemis 1 could start as early as May or June.
Editor’s note: This story, originally published Thursday, has been updated to reflect the delay in the launch of Rocket Lab until April 2 due to weather.
Mike Wall is the author of “AbroadBook (Great Grand Publishing House, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrials. Follow him on Twitter Tweet embed. Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed or on Facebook.
