SpaceX on Thursday successfully launched a communications satellite into space from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The company’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 2 am (0600 GMT) carrying the EchoStar XXIII, a commercial communications satellite for EchoStar Corporation.
The satellite will be place in orbit more that 35,000 kilometers above the earth and provide telecommunications service to Brazil, SpaceX said.
However SpaceX said it will not attempt to land Falcon 9’s first stage after launch ‘due to mission requirements.’
The mission took off from NASA’s historic launchpad 39A, the origin of the pioneering US spaceflights that took astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the space shuttle missions that ran from 1981 to 2011.
Originally built to support the Apollo program, LC-39A supported the first Saturn V launch (Apollo 4), and many subsequent Apollo missions, including Apollo 11 in July 1969.
Beginning in the late 1970s, LC-39A was modified to support Space Shuttle launches, hosting the first and last shuttle missions to orbit in 1981 and 2011 respectively.
The rocket, carrying the Echostar XXIII communications satellite was delayed from Tuesday due to high winds
In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease with NASA for the use of historic Launch Complex 39A.
Since then, the company has made significant upgrades to modernize the pad’s structures and ground systems, while also preserving its important heritage.
Extensive modifications to LC-39A have been made to support launches of both commercial and crew missions on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.
SpaceX, founded and led by billionaire Elon Musk, is emerging as leader of the modern commercial space industry after becoming the first to send a private cargo carrier to the International Space Station in 2010.
Last month Musk revealed SpaceX will launch a crewed mission beyond the moon for two private paying customers in 2018, it has been revealed.
It will be the first time in 45 years humans have been in deep space, said the company, promising its mission will go ‘faster and further’ than any humans before them.
The week-long mission will take place some time in late 2018 and will ‘skim the surface of the moon’ then venture into deep space before returning to Earth, Musk revealed.
The identity of the customers and how much they paid has been kept secret.
SpaceX expects the mission to take place some time in late 2018, after it sends a crewed NASA Dragon craft to the International Space Station.
‘We have been approached by private individuals,’ said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, after announcing the mission by tweeting ‘fly me to the moon… ok’.
‘This is a private mission with paying customers, who have placed significant deposits,’ Musk said, but added that they have so far not authorized the company to reveal their names.
Musk said the individuals know each other and are ‘very serious’ about the flight
‘This is a really exciting thing that’s happened,’ Musk told reporters.
The mission will use one of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules, which will be modified to allow communications in deep space.
Musk said it would be roughly the cost of a crewed mission to the International Space Station, and that other flight crews have already expressed interest in later flights.
‘This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them,’ SpaceX said.
The mission would ‘do a long loop around the moon’ and would take about a week.
‘It would skim the surface of the moon, go quite a bit further out into deep space’ and then return to Earth, Musk said.
‘There is some risk here,’ he said, adding the hopeful passengers are not ‘naive’ about the dangers.
The California-based company has endured two costly disasters in the past two years – a launchpad blast that destroyed a rocket and its satellite payload in September, and a June 2015 explosion after liftoff that obliterated a Dragon cargo ship packed with provisions bound for the space station.
Since the late 1960s, Pads A and B at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39 have served as backdrops for America’s most significant manned space flight endeavors – Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and space shuttle. Located on Merritt Island, Fla., just north of Cape Canaveral, the pads were originally built for the huge Apollo/Saturn V rockets that launched American astronauts on their historic journeys to the moon and back. Following the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission of July 1975, the pads were modified to support space shuttle operations. Both pads were designed to support the concept of mobile launch operations, in which space vehicles are checked out and assembled in the protected environment of the Orbiter Processing Facility and the Vehicle Assembly Building, then transported by large, tracked crawlers to the launch pad for final processing and launch.During the Apollo era, key pad service structures were mobile. For the space shuttle, two permanent service towers were installed at each pad for the first time, the fixed service structure and the rotating service structure. The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center Friday, July 8, 2011, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Atlantis was the 135th and final space shuttle launch for NASA.On April 12, 1981, shuttle operations commenced at Pad A with the launch of Columbia on STS-1. After 23 more successful launches from A, the first space shuttle to lift off from Pad B was the ill-fated Challenger in January 1986. Pad B was designated for the resumption of shuttle flights in September 1988, followed by the reactivation of Pad A in January 1990.
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