Watch SpaceX launch telecom satellite and land rocket at sea tonight
SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Hotbird 13G telecom satellite into orbit early Thursday (Nov. 3), and you can watch the action live.
A Falcon 9 rocket with Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13G satellite is scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral. in Florida space power Station Thursday at 1:22 AM EDT (0522 GMT).
You can watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceXor directly through the company (opens in new tab). Coverage is expected to begin about 15 minutes before launch.
Related: 8 Ways SpaceX Transformed Spaceflight
If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth just under nine minutes after launch and land on SpaceX’s Just Read the Instructions drone ship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
It will be the sixth launch and landing for this particular first phase.
Falcon 9’s first stage booster to support this mission previously launched CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, and one Starlink mission,” SpaceX wrote in a mission description (opens in new tab). (Crew-3 and Crew-4 were astronaut missions to the International Space Stationand CRS-22 and CRS-25 were unmanned cargo flights to the orbital lab.)
Hotbird 13G, meanwhile, continues to fly atop the upper stage of the Falcon 9, which will place the satellite in geosynchronous orbit about 36 minutes after launch.
Hotbird 13G is built by Airbus Defense and Space and will be operated by France-based telecom company Eutelsat. The satellite will eventually settle into geostationary orbit, about 22,300 miles (35,900 kilometers) above our planet.
Hotbird 13G joins its twin, Hotbird 13F, launched last month aboard a Falcon 9 to that slice of cosmic real estate. The two spacecraft will replace three existing Hotbird satellites and take on quite a bit of responsibility.
The Hotbird satellite family “constitutes one of the largest broadcasting systems in Europe, supplying 1,000 television channels to more than 160 million TV homes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East”, Eutelsat representatives wrote: (opens in new tab).
The launch of Hotbird 13G will be SpaceX’s second in two days from the Space Coast in Florida. On Tuesday (1 November), Elon Musk’s company launched the USSF-44 mission for the US Space Force from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
USSF-44 had a Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful launcher flying today. The mission was only the fourth ever for the Falcon Heavy and the first since June 2019.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated Wednesday at 9:15 PM EDT with the new launch time of 1:22 AM EDT.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
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