SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the Turkish Turksat 5A communications satellite into orbit around 33 minutes later.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) rocket is poised for launch from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during a four-hour launch window opening at 8:28 p.m. EST Thursday (0128 GMT Friday).
Perched atop the rocket is the Turksat 5A communications satellite, a spacecraft manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space in Toulouse, France, and owned by the Turkish operator Turksat.
After deployment from the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket in an elliptical transfer orbit, the Turksat 5A spacecraft will use its on-board electric thrusters to boost itself into a circular geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.
Based on Airbus’s Eurostar E3000EOR satellite design, Turksat will provide data relay and TV broadcast services for commercial customers and the Turkish government.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster set to loft the Turksat 5A payload has three previous flights to its credit. Each half of the Falcon 9’s reusable payload shroud has flown on one prior mission.
The timeline below outlines the launch sequence for the Falcon 9 flight with Turksat 5A.
Helmed by two test pilots, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane set new altitude and speed records for the company’s test program Tuesday during a powered flight over California’s Mojave Desert.
Relativity Space, a small launch startup aiming to fly its orbital rocket from Cape Canaveral for the first time next year, announced Wednesday it has signed a contract with Iridium for up to six launches of the company’s spare communications satellites. Relativity also announced it plans to develop a second launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to allow for missions to polar orbits.
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.