Working overnight on Florida’s Space Coast, SpaceX technicians transferred a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket from the company’s commercial hangar a quarter-mile up the ramp to launch pad 39A early Saturday, positioning the kerosene-fueled booster for liftoff Sunday with a classified payload for the U.S. government’s National Reconnaissance Office.
SpaceX launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office on Monday after a first stage sensor problem halted a countdown Sunday. Liftoff from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurred at 7:15 a.m. EDT (1115 GMT), and the first stage landed at nearby Cape Canaveral around nine minutes later. The upper stage’s flight entered a pre-planned news blackout a few minutes after launch.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk said last week he is “fairly confident” his company’s Falcon rockets can be made fully reusable within a couple of years, suggesting a renewed emphasis on outfitting upper stages for a scorching re-entry after engineers shelved the idea to focus on landing the launcher’s bigger booster stage.
The Italian government has decided to launch two next-generation radar reconnaissance satellites on Soyuz and Vega rockets from French Guiana, and a European Space Agency telescope to study the structures of planets around other stars will likely ride to orbit as a co-passenger on one of the missions.
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