Follow the key events of the Falcon 9 rocket’s ascent to orbit with the fifth set of 10 next-generation satellites for Iridium’s voice and data relay fleet.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket will lift off Friday at 7:13:51 a.m. PDT (10:13:51 a.m. EDT; 1413:51 GMT) Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
SpaceX will not attempt to recover the first stage on Friday’s mission.
Ground crews at a long-dormant launch pad at Cape Canaveral are stacking surplus military missile motors for the Aug. 25 launch of a Minotaur 4 rocket with a satellite designed to track orbital traffic thousands of miles above Earth.
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 first launch of an Italian-made Vega rocket since an in-flight failure nearly one year ago has been postponed to no earlier than Monday night due to unfavorable upper level winds over the Vega launch base in Kourou, French Guiana.