SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch This Week: Rare Polar Mission on Southerly Coast-Hugging Trajectory From Cape Canaveral

Elon Musk's SpaceX announced last week that the upcoming launch of Falcon 9 was rescheduled this week to perform additional pre-flight checkouts. It is a rare polar mission that will see the rocket launch from the south and hug the country's east coast.

They confirmed on Friday, June 25, that they are planning to launch the rocket no later than Wednesday, June 30, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying the Transporter-2 mission that will launch 88 small satellites to orbit.

SpaceX Launch Features Onshore Rocket Landing

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled on a southerly coast-hugging trajectory from Cape Canaveral on June 30. Spaceflight Now reported that the Falcon 9 would take off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral at 2:56 pm EDT during the 58-minute launch window. With an 80% chance of good weather on Tuesday, the launch is expected to be a success.

After the liftoff, the first stage of the rocket booster will separate from the second stage, which carries the payload, then flip around and begin an autonomous descent toward the nearby Landing Zone 1 that is only five and a half miles from the Launch Complex 40.

This will be the first time that the SpaceX launch featured an onshore landing since December last year. Residents have not seen this spectacular view in a while, which left spectators startled by the sonic booms the last time a Falcon 9 booster landed on Cape Canaveral. That previous mission launched the classified National Reconnaissance Office payload to low-Earth Orbit.

According to Florida Today, sonic booms are generated when the ticket approaches a speed-of-sound barrier during the aircraft's acceleration or deceleration. For instance, Falcon 9's sonic booms are only heard during landing as it slows its Merlin engines down because of the altitude when it is accelerating.

SpaceX said that residents in Brevard, Orange, Osceola, Indian River, Seminole, Volusia, Pol, St. Lucie, and Okeechobee counties might hear the sonic booms in this week's launch as the rocket lands in Cape Canaveral.

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SpaceX Transporter-2 Mission

In a Twitter post last week, SpaceX said that the Transporter-2 mission of SpaceX would launch 88 small satellites to orbit. Last January, they launched the Transporter-1 with 143 satellites.

Targeting Tuesday, June 29 for launch of Transporter-2. This mission will launch 88 spacecraft to orbit and more customer mass than SpaceX’s previous dedicated rideshare mission
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 25, 2021

Spaceflight Now continued the report that although Transporter-2 mission will not break the record of Transporter-1, the customer spacecraft awaiting liftoff on Tuesday have a combined mass greater than the previous rideshare mission.

The satellites aboard the Transporter-2 mission are for the US military, which includes a radar and optical Earth observation satellites for Satellogic, and ICEYE, which are commercial remote sensing companies from Argentina and Finland. Aboard the rocket also are CubeSats for the US and foreign operators.

This week's launch will be the 20th Falcon 9 rocket launch for 2021, wherein 19 of which are mainly on landings o drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. That makes this week's landing special since the rocket landing will be in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.