SpaceX rocket launch delayed until weather conditions improve. When will it blast off?
A Falcon 9 rocket and its 50 satellites will wait until Thursday night before trying to depart from Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc.
The two-stage rocket’s liftoff will target 11:47 p.m. from Space Launch Complex-4 on South Base.
“The additional time allows teams to complete pre-launch checkouts and for weather conditions to improve,” according to an update posted Tuesday afternoon to the Space Exploration Technologies Twitter account.
The team initially planned for a Monday night launch and then announced it would not occur before Tuesday night before revealing the latest delay.
Following the launch, the first-stage booster will return to Vandenberg, likely accompanied by sonic booms that could be audible in Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.
The mission known as Transporter-7 involves a dedicated rideshare payload including CubeSats, MicroSats, hosted payloads and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time, according to SpaceX.
Among customers for this mission is Santa Barbara-based Umbra, manufacturer of synthetic aperture radar satellites capable of delivering images despite clouds, smoke and total darkness with industry-leading resolution.
A batch of cremated remains of people and a few cats also will head to space on the newest memorial spaceflight for Celestis Inc.
Deployment of the Transporter-7 payloads will begin approximately an hour after launch and end more than 2 1/2 hours later.
A live webcast of this mission will begin about 10 minutes prior to liftoff at SpaceX and on the firm’s channel on YouTube.
Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com .
