EDITOR’S NOTE: Updated after SpaceX scrubbed Wednesday’s launch attempt.
SpaceX’s second Falcon Heavy rocket is set for liftoff Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the heavy-lift launcher will head on an easterly course over the Atlantic Ocean atop more than 5 million pounds of thrust.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket is poised for launch from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a launch window Thursday that opens at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT) and closes at 8:31 p.m. EDT (0031 GMT).
The payload mounted atop the Falcon Heavy rocket is Arabsat 6A, a communications satellite built by Lockheed Martin for Arabsat, an operator based in Saudi Arabia.
The graphic above illustrates the paths of the Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters, center core stage, and second stage during the rocket’s launch and landing operations. Four different components of the Falcon Heavy will follow trajectories toward different landing zones, or toward Earth orbit.
The timeline below outlines the launch sequence for the Falcon Heavy’s second mission — and first commercial flight.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the South Korean Anasis 2 military communications satellite into orbit around 32 minutes later.
United Launch Alliance technicians raised the first stage of the company’s next Atlas 5 rocket onto a mobile launch platform at Cape Canaveral Thursday, kicking off the launch vehicle’s build-up for a mission scheduled for liftoff May 16 with the U.S. military’s hush-hush X-37B spaceplane.
The next flight of the U.S. military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane — scheduled for liftoff May 16 from Cape Canaveral — will carry more experiments into orbit than any of the winged ship’s previous missions, including two payloads for NASA and a small deployable satellite built by Air Force Academy cadets.