Nuked Bad weather forced ULA to push back the launch to Sunday, may 17th, with liftoff scheduled for 9:14am et. Live coverage will resume at 10:03am et.
The Air Force’s X-37B is headed back to space on Saturday morning for its sixth mission in earth orbit. It will be carrying a number of experiments and testing out new systems in space before returning them to earth.
The X-37B landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on October 27 after spending a total of 780 days in space. That flight marked the X-37B’s longest mission yet in space, and the vehicle has now spent seven years and 10 months in orbit.
This will be the first X-37B mission to use a service module to host experiments. The mission will have even more experiments than usual.
falcon-8 is a small satellite called falconsat-8 that carries five experimental payloads. The spaceplane will supposedly deploy the falconsat-8 when it reaches orbit. Nasa is also sending two experiments up on this flight to study how space radiation degrades certain materials.
The X-37B is still considered an asset of the US Air Force. But the newly minted space force will oversee the mission from launch to landing. The spacecraft’s last ride was on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
The Air Force and the United launch alliance are adding a small tribute to those affected by covid-19 on this flight. A written message has been added to the side of the Atlas V rocket.
