SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral early Sunday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the JCSAT 16 communications satellite into orbit 32 minutes later.
The 229-foot-tall rocket is poised for launch from Complex 40 at 1:26 a.m. EDT (0526 GMT) Sunday at the opening of a 120-minute launch window.
Perched atop the rocket is the JCSAT 16 communications satellite, a spacecraft made by Space Systems/Loral, ready to beam television programming and data services across Japan and the Asia-Pacific. The rocket will place the satellite into a high-altitude geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The timeline below outlines the launch sequence for the Falcon 9 flight with JCSAT 16. It does not include times for the experimental descent and landing attempt of the first stage booster on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX’s landing platform is positioned about 370 miles (600 kilometers) east of Cape Canaveral for the first stage landing attempt, which is expected around 10 minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX launched 57 Starlink broadband satellites and a pair of Earth observation smallsats for BlackSky on top of a Falcon 9 rocket at 1:12 a.m. EDT (0512 GMT) Friday. The 90th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket took off from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The U.S. military’s next GPS navigation satellite was ready for launch from Cape Canaveral at 9:43 p.m. EDT Friday (0143 GMT Saturday) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. But SpaceX aborted the countdown just two seconds prior to liftoff.
SpaceX’s fifth launch for Iridium’s upgraded mobile communications network occurred at 7:13 a.m. PDT (10:13 a.m. EDT; 1413 GMT) Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The Falcon 9 rocket flew with a reused first stage, but SpaceX did not intend to recover the booster after Friday’s launch.