Watch: SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket from Southern California
Vivian Chow
·3 min read
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Friday night.
The rocket lifted off at 8:14 p.m. PT
Friday night’s mission, called NROL-186, involved transporting a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, a government agency in charge of designing and building spy satellites for the U.S.
After launching vertically, the Falcon began a gradual turn while continuing to climb into orbit.
Following stage separation after liftoff, the Falcon’s reusable booster made a pinpoint landing back on the spaceport drone ship, “Of Course I Still Love You,” which is stationed in the Pacific Ocean.
The first-stage booster on this particular Falcon 9 rocket has completed eight liftoffs so far.
The booster has previously launched Crew-7, CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, and two Starlink missions.
Friday night’s launch could be visible from hundreds of miles away along the Southern California coast.
The mission was the 66th Falcon 9 flight in 2024. So far, 47 of the rocket’s launches were dedicated to building SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite network in low Earth orbit.
Footage of the launch can be seen in the video player above.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
If you’re searching for today’s best savings interest rates, we’ve narrowed down some of the top offers. Learn more about savings interest rates today.
Richardson finished fourth in the women's 200-meter final at the U.S. Olympic track & field trials on Saturday evening, one spot shy of what she needed to punch her ticket to Paris in the event.
The series announced this week that it’s rebranding to Extreme H, and unveiled a hydrogen-powered race car it’s calling the Pioneer 25 to usher in the transition. The first season is slated to begin in April 2025
From huge stores of customers' personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 to date have already surpassed at least 1 billion stolen records and rising. But it wasn't until a security researcher discovered that the exposed data contained encrypted passcodes used for accessing a customer's AT&T account that the telecoms giant took action.
NASA and Boeing plan to spend the next few weeks conducting tests on the ground in order to better understand issues with the Starliner spacecraft’s thrusters before giving its crew the go-ahead to fly back to Earth, officials said in a press conference Friday.