A Falcon 9 stands ready for a Starlink mission at Cape Canaveral’s pad 40. File photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
Update 3:07 p.m. EDT: SpaceX pushed back the T-0 liftoff time of the Falcon 9 rocket.
SpaceX continues to push the pace of its launch cadence as it readies another Falcon 9 rocket for flight on Friday evening. If successful, the mission will mark SpaceX’s 14th launch of the month, a new industry record for launch.
Of course, the milestone would be adding to the record set earlier this week, when SpaceX launched its 13th Falcon 9 to send the European Space Agency’s EarthCARE satellite up to orbit. Liftoff of this latest mission, Starlink 6-64 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, is set for 10:11 p.m. EDT (0211 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The first stage booster for this mission, tail number B1076 in the SpaceX fleet, will be launching for a 14th time. It previously launched missions like SpaceX’s 26th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-26) Dragon flight to the International Space Station, NASA’s TEMPO payload onboard the Intelsat 40e satellite and seven batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1076 will land on the SpaceX droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ If successful, this will be the 73rd landing for ASOG and the 315th booster landing for SpaceX.
The record setting launch comes at the tail end of a week of historic milestones for SpaceX. May 25 was the 12th anniversary of the Dragon spacecraft becoming the first private spacecraft to dock with the ISS. May 30 was the fourth anniversary of the launch of the Demo-2 mission, marking the return of human spaceflight to American soil in the wake of the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011.
SpaceX is preparing for two more crewed missions over the course of the summer: Polaris Dawn and Crew-9.
Today marks the fourth anniversary of Falcon 9 launching @NASA’s Demo-2 mission to the @space_station, returning human spaceflight to the United States pic.twitter.com/jzwyCwam3l
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 30, 2024