Start your Sunday morning off right by watching a SpaceX rocket launch and landing. The company’s Falcon 9 is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida tomorrow, carrying a Dragon cargo capsule filled with nearly 5,500 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. About 10 minutes after take off, the majority of the rocket will return to the Cape and attempt to land at SpaceX’s ground-based landing site, called Landing Zone 1.
This launch is extra special
It’s SpaceX’s tenth cargo resupply mission for NASA, but the launch is extra special given where the rocket is launching from. The Falcon 9 will take off from a pad at a site on the Cape called Launch Complex 39A. The pad is part of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and it’s been home to the biggest space missions of the past 50 years. The Apollo 11 mission launched from 39A, as well as the final flight of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
The 39A pad has been dormant since then. But in 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease with NASA to move into Launch Complex 39A and update the pad to support launches of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and its future heavy-life vehicle, the Falcon Heavy. That refurbishment process has taken a while. “We had to reconfigure all the propellant systems,” CEO Elon Musk told The Verge in a direct message on Twitter. Before SpaceX moved in, the ground systems at the launch pad were made to support the Space Shuttle, which ran on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The Falcon 9, on the other hand, runs on a form of kerosene and liquid oxygen that’s much colder than what the Shuttle used.
The launch wasn’t supposed to take place from 39A, though. In fact, the plan was for the mission to happen last year from SpaceX’s other site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station called Launch Complex 40. However, the launch was pushed back after one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets exploded on the pad at LC40 during a routine fueling procedure. The pad was badly damaged, and the company was forced to ground all of its rockets as it investigated the launch. In January, SpaceX said it had identified the source of the failure and was taking steps to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. The company then successfully returned to flight by launching one of its Falcon 9s from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.