Falcon 9’s launch failure viewed from KSC press site

NASA has selected SpaceX to build a spacecraft to land the first astronauts on the moon since 1972, choosing Elon Musk’s space company over competing proposals from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and the aerospace firm Dynetics, officials announced Friday.

The rocket launched more than 340 times successively and successfully before it encountered an issue with its upper stage on July 11. Liftoff of the Starlink 10-9 mission happened at 1:45 a.m. EDT (0545 UTC).

A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the Galaxy 37 communications satellite for Intelsat in the early hours of Thursday. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 1 a.m. EDT (0500 UTC).