SpaceX early Saturday will try again to launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a batch of data satellites for the U.S. military’s Space Development Agency (SDA), five days after a last-minute abort scrubbed the first attempt.
Liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is scheduled for 12:39 a.m. PDT (3:39 EDT / 0739 UTC). The Falcon 9 will take a southerly trajectory on departure from Space Launch Complex 4E, currently SpaceX’s only launch facility on the West Coast.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage starting about 30 minutes prior to launch.
Monday’s launch attempt was halted by an auto-abort with 58 seconds remaining on the clock. The halt was triggered moments after the rocket’s onboard computers took control of the countdown. SpaceX did not disclose the cause of the abort but in a social media post said: “Vehicle and payload are in good health, and teams are resetting for a launch attempt no earlier than tomorrow, October 6.”
However, the vehicle was lowered to a horizontal position at the pad, usually a sign of troubleshooting a hardware issue, and the launch was repeatedly pushed back a day at a time. A missile test from Vandenberg using the Western Test Range on Friday might have contributed to the launch finally settling on Saturday.
The mission, dubbed Tranche 1 Transport Layer A (T1TL-A), is the fourth mission sending production satellites into orbit for the SDA. S. military and its allies through space-based capabilities, like missile tracking and secure communications.
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