SpaceX will try again Wednesday to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, following a last-minute scrub Monday due to poor weather.
The heavy lift rocket will use about 5.1 million pounds of thrust to propel ViaSat-3 F3 to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, the third and final satellite in the ViaSat-3 series.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A is scheduled for 10:13 a.m. EDT (1413 UTC), at the opening of an 85-minute window. Deployment of the six metric ton spacecraft is anticipated nearly five hours after taking off from Florida’s Space Coast.
“As the spacecraft enters service, I think what you’re going to see is more and more of our airline customers providing free use of airborne WiFi. And with recent updates to the networks and everything, a number of those have enabled free streaming,” said Dave Abrahamian, Viasat’s vice president of Satellite Systems.
“You can stream Netflix at 4K in the sky. When we started many, many years ago with ViaSat-1, you couldn’t do that. Just being able to get basic SMS or email service in the air was a big deal, but now we’re up to streaming in 4K. So I think [the public will] appreciate the results of the program without necessarily understanding how we got there, what enables it.”
