Covering All Things Florida
NASA’s Crew Dragon spacecraft will be making its final splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean next year . The upcoming Crew-9 mission, set to launch no earlier than August 18, 2024, could be the last to conclude with a landing off the U.S. East Coast.
SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 carrying twenty-three Starlink satellites from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad LC-39A early Saturday morning. The launch window for the Falcon 9’s “return to flight” opens at 12:21 AM EDT on July 27 and extends until 04:21 AM the same day. If needed, the company has a backup launch window at the same time, twenty-four hours later, on July 28.
SpaceX has been cleared to resume launching Falcon 9 by the FAA. Almost immediately afterward, the company announced a launch of the venerable rocket from Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center early Sunday morning.The company stated that the Starlink 9-3 mishap in a statement on their website “The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line,” SpaceX said.
NASA’s Steve Stich and Boeing’s Mark Nappi provided an update on the Boeing Starliner CFT flight today in a teleconference. They stated that while no return date has been set for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return aboard the spacecraft, the agency and Boeing are relatively close to a Readiness Review that must be conducted prior to Starliner undocking from ISS and returning to Earth. According to NASA, that review may come as soon as the end of next week — or August 2, 2024.
“I think we’re starting to close in on those final pieces of the flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely,” said Steve Stich.
NASA’s Artemis II mission is progressing steadily with the recent arrival of the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage to the Kennedy Space Center. This event marks the beginning of months of assembly and testing of SLS before its roll out to LC-39B sometime next year.
SpaceX conducted a static-firing of the nine Merlin engines of a Falcon 9 booster first stage at SLC-40 last night as the company prepares to return to flight after a very rare in-flight failure on July 11.
After berthing in the Turn Basin by the Press Center yesterday, the Core Stage of Artemis II was offloaded today and moved into the VAB. The process began around 9 a.m. EDT and took nearly three hours until the 212-foot rocket traveled the relatively short distance—perhaps 1/2 kilometer—to the VAB.
Kennedy Space Center, FL – Today media gathered at KSC to greet the arrival of the NASA Pegasus barge ship carrying the iconic orange center core of the SLS Artemis ll rocket. It arrived about 10:30 this morning at the KSC Turning Basin where tugboats Termite and American position it at the dock so the rocket core can be unloaded and prepared for its truck journey to the nearby VAB son July 24th.
Rocket launches are happening weekly from America’s spaceports. Living in Ohio, I travel around the country chasing the next launch to photograph. But how do I know when the next launch will be? And with frequent delays and shifts in launch schedules, how do I know it’s still on?
Business is picking up for the Artemis teams at Kennedy Space Center — the core stage for Artemis 2 has arrived in Port Canaveral, after it traveled from its manufacturing site in Mississippi.
On July 11, 2024, SpaceX experienced a rare in-flight failure with its Falcon 9 rocket during the Starlink 9-3 mission. This mission aimed to deploy 20 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The launch initially appeared successful, but the second stage encountered an anomaly during its critical burn phase, which prevented the rocket from achieving its intended orbit.
In a statement released today, NASA stated that, “[Agency] and Boeing engineers are evaluating results from last week’s engine tests at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico as the team works through plans to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test from the International Space Station in the coming weeks.”
