Falcon 9 Set to Usher in the Dawn of a New Age (literally)

Falcon 9 Ready to Launch

The official sunrise won’t be until 6:30  Saturday morning, but for the 1,860 employees of SpaceX and thousands of supporters around the globe, the curtain goes up on a new chapter in space an hour and half earlier, at 4:55 am. That is when if all goes as planned the Falcon 9 launch vehicle will take off from Launch complex 40 and ascend on the power of its 9 Merlin engines to a rendezvous orbit with the International Space Station.

With an instantaneous launch window of only a moment, there is almost no opportunity for a problem to develop. If it does, new launch windows will occur every third day until the end of May, when the sun’s beta angle precludes further launches for several weeks due to increased heating.