SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Monday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the Koreasat 5A communications satellite into orbit around 36 minutes later.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket is poised for launch from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:34 p.m. EDT (1934 GMT) Monday at the opening of a 144-minute launch window.
Perched atop the rocket is the Koreasat 5A communications satellite, a spacecraft made by Thales Alenia Space for KTsat, a South Korean company which will use the new telecom relay station to broadcast television, provide Internet connectivity and support maritime services over the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and broad swaths of Asia, including Korea and Japan.
The timeline below outlines the launch sequence for the Falcon 9 flight with Koreasat 5A.
A month-and-a-half after a general strike in French Guiana halted launch preparations, an Ariane 5 rocket arrived at its launch pad Wednesday on the northeastern coast of South America, a day before hauling two communications satellites into orbit for the Brazilian government and a South Korean company.
SpaceX launched the first of the company’s upgraded generation of Falcon 9 launchers, known as Block 5, from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT). The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off with Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, and SpaceX recovered the rocket’s first stage on a vessel in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX broke another re-flight record on Friday evening with the launch of 23 more Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 booster making its 18th flight. Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 8:37 p.m. EDT (0037 UTC on Nov. 4).