Update as of 6:31 PM ET: SpaceX has successfully launched two SES satellites into orbit 17:48 EST (2221 GMT) for the company’s O3b mPower network, marking the 200th mission of the SpaceX booster and eight flights for this Falcon 9 rocket. Watch the launch video and read our wrap story🇧🇷
SpaceX will launch two satellites for the telecommunications company SES on Friday (December 16), and you can watch the action live.
THE Sahin 9 The rocket, carrying SES’s O3b mPower 1 and 2 satellites, is scheduled to lift off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Friday in an 87-minute window starting at 4:21 p.m. EST (2121 GMT).
Watch it live here on Space.com SpaceX or directly through the company (opens in new tab)🇧🇷 Coverage is expected to begin approximately 15 minutes prior to launch.
Related: 8 ways SpaceX is changing spaceflight
If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth a little over nine minutes after launch for a soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean on one of SpaceX’s robotic drones.
According to a, this will be the eighth takeoff and touchdown for this particular booster SpaceX mission description (opens in new tab)🇧🇷 Four of his previous flights were missions International Space Station For NASA – two crewed and two uncrewed.
The Falcon 9 upper stage will continue to launch the two satellites into orbit. The first one is scheduled to be placed in the mean Earth orbit (MEO) one hour and 53 minutes after liftoff, and the second one is scheduled to be placed seven minutes later.
O3b mPower 1 and 2 are the first two satellites of the 11-spacecraft constellation SES plans to assemble at MEO. According to SES, which is headquartered in Luxembourg and France, the satellites will provide high-throughput and low-latency communications for customers around the world.
This mission is part of a busy schedule for SpaceX. The company started private Japanese production Hakuto-R It landed on the moon on Sunday (Dec. 11) and was due to lift off the SWOT water monitoring satellite for NASA early Friday morning.
SpaceX also plans to launch another big batch starlink Internet satellites from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday (Dec. 17).
Mike Wall is the author of “There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter. @michaeldwall (opens in new tab)🇧🇷 Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab)🇧🇷
