Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with Spaceflight’s SSO-A: SmallSat Express rideshare mission carrying 64 smallsats into orbit for a variety of U.S. and international customers. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
12/02/2018 10:49
Stephen Clark Stephen Clark
SpaceX has announced the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and the SSO-A rideshare mission has been pushed back 24 hours to Monday.
The launch window each day is fixed, opening at 10:31:47 a.m. PST (1:31:47 p.m. EST; 1831:47 GMT).
12/02/2018 10:33
SpaceX has pushed back this launch two times in recent weeks, first after ordering additional inspections and again to wait for improved weather conditions.
12/02/2018 10:28
SpaceX teams at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are preparing to launch a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Sunday, powered by a reused first stage booster flying on its third mission, a first for the company as engineers continue chasing a long-term goal of re-flying the same rocket on back-to-back days.
That heady goal is still some time away — SpaceX chief executive
Elon Musk said in May that a 24-hour rocket turnaround could happen in 2019 — but drives the company’s efforts to gradually cut the time between flights of the same first stage.
Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said in October that Falcon 9 rockets will soon begin logging more flights using the same airframe, a step-by-step approach that will take a big leap forward with Sunday’s mission from Vandenberg, a military base around 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles.
“So far, we’ve only flown a booster twice,” Koenigsmann said Oct. 3 in a speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany. “Beginning soon, we will start flying a booster three times, and then take it to four times, five times, an so on and so forth. We have obviously to be very careful in evaluating boosters that come back after multiple flights. We want to make sure that we don’t see wear-and-tear in the wrong spots.”