SpaceX Rocket Launches — Courtesy: Shutterstock — John Huntington
SpaceX finally launched a Falcon 9 rocket late Monday night, capping an 11-day launch drought caused by wind that was the longest for the Space Coast since April. The delay occurred after this weekend’s extreme weather passed.
A cold front dropped the temperature to 56 degrees as SpaceX’s Starlink 6-34 mission took out from Launch Complex 40 at 11:01 p.m. EST at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The launch was the first from Brevard County since SpaceX’s Starlink mission on December 7, and it sent another 23 Starlink internet satellites into low-Earth orbit.
At Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, that was the longest local halt since a 12-day launch gap that ran from April 7 (the SpaceX Intelsat 40e/NASA TEMPO mission) to April 19 (the SpaceX Starlink 6-2 mission).
In a tweet on the morning of December 12, Space Florida—the state’s aerospace finance and development authority—praised the Cape’s active orbital launch program.
The Space Florida tweet stated, “Florida spaceports have sent approximately 1,918,600 lbs. of payloads to orbit in 2023.”
“We are likely to reach 2 million lbs. to orbit by (end of year),” said the post.
With one minute and forty-five seconds left in the countdown on December 12, SpaceX workers abandoned an earlier attempt to launch the Starlink 6-34 mission due to strong ground winds.
With two weeks left in the 2023 calendar, Monday’s SpaceX mission was the record-tying 69th orbital launch from the Space Coast this year.
That being said, a navigational alert from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency suggests that Cape Canaveral’s next launch window will open late Friday night and run for four and a half hours until early Saturday morning, though SpaceX has not yet made a declaration on the matter.
This future launch window begins on Friday at 11 p.m. and runs until Saturday at 3:31 a.m. The Starlink 6-34 mission on Monday has the same hours as those.
The Space Force’s covert X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle will then be launched on the USSF-52 mission on December 28 at 7 p.m. by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. There is a four-hour window for the launch, in case there are any delays.
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Born and raised in South Florida, Krystal is a recent graduate from the University of Miami with professional writing experience at the collegiate and national news outlet levels. She’s a foodie who loves all things travel, the beach, & visiting new places throughout Florida.