How to watch tonight’s record-breaking Minotaur rocket launch

Scott Sutherland

Tonight's launch of an Orbital Sciences Minotaur rocket, carrying a record 29 satellites into orbit at once, will be available to watch on the internet, but residents of the eastern United States and parts of eastern Canada can actually watch it live just by stepping outside.

The launch, which will take place sometime between 7:30 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. Eastern Time (depending on the weather), will be happening from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, along the east coast of Virginia. The main reason for the launch is to put the U.S. Air Force's STPSat-3 spacecraft into orbit, which has five different experiments on board, but hitching a ride along with it are 28 tiny cubesats, covering various private and government missions. Many of these cubesats are going up to find out exactly how well these kinds of satellites perform and how useful they can be to space operations. However, some notable 'passengers' on this flight include Firefly, a NASA mission to study lightning, Horus (also called 'STARE-B'), a tiny satellite that will test the use of space-based telescopes to detect space junk, and TJ³Sat, which is the first satellite build by high school students to be launched into orbit.

You can check out a live webfeed of the launch here, by clicking on the video below after 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

However, if you're interested in seeing it for yourself, Orbital Sciences has provided a map that shows where the launch will be visible from, and how long after the launch you can expect to see the rocket.

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Unlike some other recent launches, like the moon mission LADEE, which had a fairly shallow trajectory, this rocket will have a much steeper climb, and so it will be visible for a much greater distance around the launch facility. Light pollution or clouds will definitely spoil the view, but the best place to see it from in Canada will be southern Ontario, from London to Cornwall, and along southern Quebec, south and southeast of Montreal. Southern parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia should also have a chance to catch it heading into space. Just look to the southeast right at launch time and you might see it at around two minutes after liftoff.

If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can download a kmz file (click here), that will show the exact trajectory of the rocket so you can see what it will look like from your location.

(Images courtesy: NASA Goddard, Orbital Sciences Corporation)

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