SpaceX set for big test with Falcon 9 launch tonight

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted four hours before it was supposed to launch that the crew was punting for another 24 hours.

The mission will also be the first time SpaceX has tried to land its Falcon 9 rocket on land.

Today, SpaceX will try for the fourth time to land a rocket safely after a flight that would allow engineers to reuse the rocket and make future flights far cheaper.

SpaceX via FlickrElon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX will launch the most powerful version of its Falcon 9 rocket on Monday, December 21 at 8:34 p.m. ET out of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Assuming SpaceX’s plans come to fruition, a Falcon 9 flight from Cape Canaveral on Sunday will end with a vertical rocket-assisted landing at an abandoned Cold War-era launch facility a few miles away. The firm has taken steps to fix that drawback and has additionally made the most recent model of the Falcon 9 about 30 % extra highly effective than earlier iterations, Musk has stated. Two consecutive failures could be devastating for the company.

“If successful, this test would mark the first time in history an orbital rocket has successfully achieved a land landing”, SpaceX said in a statement.

Last month, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder and owner of the Washington Post, landed a suborbital rocket, that flew just past the boundary of space. The company has previously attempted to land the rocket on a water barge.

It’s the first SpaceX mission since June, when a faulty strut caused its spaceship to explode mid air and destroy the NASA cargo it was carrying.

A traditional rocket delivers its payload to space and then burns up harmlessly as space junk when it re-enter’s Earth’s atmosphere. The stages hit the platforms in both attempts, but exploded.

SpaceX has warned residents on the Space Coast that they could hear a sonic boom as a result of the landing attempt.