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| SpaceX's Falcon 9 standing at SLC-40 for the first time in a year Credit: SpaceX |
SpaceX will be launching another resupply mission to the International Space Station using a reused Dragon spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Resupply Service contract. The mission will also include a flight-proven first stage which was previously used to launch the CRS-11 mission back in June 2017 and the Dragon spacecraft was last used to support the CRS-6 mission in April of 2015. After the first stage separates, the booster will flip around and fly back towards Cape Canaveral and perform a landing at SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1). The Dragon spacecraft is filled with approximately 4,800lbs of crew supplies and experiments as well as important materials to support several science and research investigations. It will rendezvous with the ISS on December 15th and will be captured by the station's robotic arm to be berthed with the station. Dragon will stay attached to the station for about a month and will then be returned to Earth and recovered in the Pacific Ocean. The Falcon 9 will liftoff tomorrow at 11:46am EST from Space Launch Complex 40 with a backup launch for Dec. 13th at 11:24am EST. Weather is currently 90% go for the launch tomorrow.
Space Launch Complex 40
This will be the first launch from SLC-40 since the anomaly that occurred during a static fire for the launch of Amos-6 back on September 1st, 2016. The SpaceX team have been launching Falcon 9s from LC-39A in SLC-40s downtime. While launching from LC-39A, they've been working tirelessly on getting the pad functioning again as well as getting Falcon Heavy ready. Now that SLC-40 is back online, work towards the Falcon Heavy flight will start to accelerate for it's Demo flight sometime in January of 2018.
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