Covering All Things Florida
Yesterday’s planned launch of Soyuz M-25 to the International Space Station was aborted with twenty seconds left in the countdown. NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus are fine, and were evacuated from the Soyuz capsule shortly afterwards.
After an incredibly busy week for spaceflight last week, this week promises to be equally busy. We have two Starlink launches (one from Vandenberg, another from KSC), SpaceX/NASA CRS-30 from SLC-40 sending supplies to ISS, and a Rocket Lab launch from Wallops early on the 21st. Also, a NASA astronaut is heading to ISS aboard a Soyuz on Thursday as well.
Update: New Launch Window opens 3/14/24 7:04 PM EDT
SpaceX plans to launch the Starlink 6-44 mission tonight, Thursday, March 14, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
The payload will be another tranche of 23 Starlink satellites that will be ferried low-Earth orbit from pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. According to the company, “liftoff is targeted for 7:04 PM EDT, with backup opportunities available until 11:29 PM EDT.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station earlier this evening, kicking off what could prove to be quite a busy week for the company.
SpaceX plans to launch the Starlink 6-43 mission Sunday, March 10 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
The payload will be another tranche of 23 Starlink satellites that will be ferried low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. According to the company on Saturday, March 10th, “liftoff is targeted for 7:05 p.m. ET, with backup opportunities available until 11:03 p.m. ET. If needed, additional opportunities are also available on Monday, March 11 starting at 6:40 p.m. ET.”
On March 7, 2023, the US Space Force, along with the Department of the Air Force, held the third of three in-person meetings in the Cape Canaveral / Titusville area, The purpose of the meetings was to provide information about a proposed Environmental Impact Study that would ultimately see SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket launch and land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Famed Florida fine-arts photographer Clyde Butcher once said, “Out west, they have their mountains. We have our clouds.” Butcher’s observation was spot-on. The Sunshine State is home to some incredible sights in our skies—be it the setting sun illuminating a faraway thunderstorm, a wall cloud from an approaching tropical storm, or even just a regular day when the clouds take on shapes where they appear to be animals or something else familiar. There’s always something interesting to see here by simply looking upwards into the atmosphere.
When I was a kid, Wolfie’s in Cocoa Beach was one of my Dad’s favorites to take me out to eat. It was kid-friendly, unlike a place like The Mousetrap or other infamous and legendary Cocoa Beach haunts. They’re all long gone now, as is the nature of restaurants in a resort town. One that is especially missed by many is Wolfie’s, a place that not only had a great lunch but also a side note in space history that is funny today but was not at all amusing in the mid-1960s.
With Crew-8’s Falcon 9 sitting on Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center this morning waiting for weather to improve along its launch corridor, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying 23 more Starlink Version 2 Mini satellites to low-Earth orbit from its other launch pad on the Eastern Range at SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
During the NASA Administrator Briefing from the Kennedy Space Center mainly centered around Crew-8 readiness today, Steve Stich, the Manager of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program gave some insight about the status of the planned first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner. That launch is currently planned for late April of this year.
While Intuitive Machines soft-landing on the moon yesterday was successful, and the first by an American spacecraft in over fifty years, the news today is not all good: the company thinks that Odysseus, the company’s lunar lander is highly tilted or perhaps on its side.
Intuitive Machines has confirmed that the IM-1 Nova-C class lunar lander “Odysseus” touched down on the surface of the Moon today, sometime around 6:30 PM EST. The exact time of touchdown is not yet known, as the company has not yet downloaded and released data from the spacecraft.