Spacex falcon 9 rocket launch software#

SpaceX conducts successful static hot fire test of Falcon 9 booster atop Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on 15 June 2017 as seen from Space View Park, Titusville, FL.

The used 229-foot-tall (70-meter) SpaceX Falcon 9 will deliver BulgariaSat-1 to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). The geostationary comsat will provide direct-to-home television (DTH) and data communications services to Southeastern Europe, including the Balkans and other European regions.įlight-proven SpaceX Falcon 9 poised for launch of BulgariaSat-1 on Jat Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. EDT, or 18:10 UTC from SpaceX’s seaside Launch Complex 39A on NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.īulgariaSat is an affiliate of Bulsatcom, Bulgaria’s largest digital television provider.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – For only the second time in history, SpaceX will launch a ‘flight-proven’ Falcon 9 rocket this Friday afternoon and the payload this time for this remarkable and science fictionesque milestone is the first geostationary communications satellite for the nation of Bulgaria.īlastoff of the BulgariaSat-1 communications satellite for commercial broadband provider BulgariaSat is slated for early Friday afternoon, June 23 at 2:10 p.m. “It's much easier to get that organized when there is slow traffic in space, rather than waiting until it's a problem.Flight-proven SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage arrives at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida slated for launch of BulgariaSat-1 on June 23, 2017. 'If we get into the future where there are cities and bases on the moon, we want to know what's out there,” McDowell tells the BBC. All of that space junk whizzing around the planet could complicate future space travel. Last November, astronauts in the International Space Station were forced to shelter in their spacecraft when they passed through a debris cloud from a Russian anti-satellite test. Because of the high speed that objects travel in space (around five miles per second), a collision with even a tiny chip of free-floating paint can damage a spacecraft.

Though the booster's crash will be largely uneventful, space debris can have serious consequences. In 2009, NASA fired its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite onto the moon's south pole, which released a plume of material that allowed scientists to confirm the presence of water ice. Unlike deliberate collisions with the lunar surface, this impact is not likely to reveal anything new about the moon. And so if you imagine throwing that at a rock at 5,000 miles an hour, it's not going to be happy,' McDowell tells the BBC. 'It's basically a four-tonne empty metal tank, with a rocket engine on the back. When the rocket’s second stage finally collides with the moon at roughly 5,771 mph, it will explode on impact. The SpaceX booster was part of the company’s first deep-space mission designed to monitor solar storms and Earth's climate, per Live Science's Ben Turner. After the booster sent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite to a gravitationally-stable Lagrange point, the rocket’s second stage became derelict. “And it couldn’t do it because the rocket had hit the moon.”

Spacex falcon 9 rocket launch software#

“I realized that my software complained because it couldn’t project the orbit past March 4,” Gray told Timothy Bella of the Washington Post. Gray predicts the rocket will hit the far side of the moon on March 4, 2022. While the SpaceX rocket isn’t the only piece of “space junk” orbiting Earth, it could be the first documented rocket collision with the moon, according to data analyst Bill Gray who developed software that tracks near-Earth objects. This may have happened a bunch of times before, we just didn't notice.” 'Over the decades there have been maybe 50 large objects that we've totally lost track of. 'It's been dead-just following the laws of gravity,” McDowell says to Georgina Rannard for BBC. The rocket has been pulled by the competing gravitational forces of the Earth, moon, and sun, which has made its path chaotic, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The rocket’s second stage has been in an uncontrolled orbit ever since. The Falcon 9 booster was launched by Elon Musk's space exploration company in 2015, but after completing its mission, it didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth. A piece of a SpaceX rocket will crash into the moon after spending nearly seven years hurtling through space, experts predict.