After four straight days of weather scrubs, technical hiccups, and nerve-grinding countdown halts, SpaceX finally turned frustration into triumph on Monday morning—successfully delivering 24 Amazon Kuiper satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Credit SpaceX
The long-delayed KF-02 mission thundered away from Space Launch Complex 40 at 8:35 a.m. EDT (12:35 UTC), just as the first light of the day washed over Florida’s Space Coast. It was the fifth scheduled attempt, but the first to get off the ground—literally.
The mission’s rocky path to orbit began last Thursday, when SpaceX halted the countdown before fueling even began, citing the need for “additional vehicle checkouts.” Engineers rolled the Falcon 9 horizontal to address what was widely believed to be a technical issue.
On Friday, the launch was called off again—this time just hours before liftoff. Saturday brought a glimmer of hope, but the weather had other plans: with just 28 seconds left on the clock, a sudden downpour forced a hard stop. Sunday’s attempt never got that far, with weather officers flagging high clouds and recovery area concerns.
“The recovery weather is a no-go,” a launch director had warned during one scrub, underscoring just how many moving parts—both on Earth and in the sky—must align for a mission to proceed.
By Monday, the forecast from the 45th Weather Squadron improved dramatically. Overnight, launch odds climbed from 75% to a healthy 90% favorable, with only a slight chance of early morning showers.
The Falcon 9’s first-stage booster, B1091, wasn’t just another workhorse—it was a converted Falcon Heavy center core flying in Falcon 9 mode for the first time. SpaceX plans to use it “a handful of times” in this configuration before reconfiguring it back into a Falcon Heavy role, according to company VP Jon Edwards.
Eight minutes after liftoff, B1091 made a precision landing on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas stationed in the Atlantic, marking the vessel’s 120th booster recovery and SpaceX’s 486th overall.
The upper stage placed the satellites into a parking orbit just over eight minutes after launch, then performed a brief burn at T+53 minutes to circularize. A seven-minute deployment sequence began at T+56 minutes, 18 seconds, sending all 24 Kuiper satellites drifting free to begin checkout and commissioning.
Project Kuiper—Amazon’s answer to SpaceX’s own Starlink—plans to deploy over 3,000 satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed broadband to underserved regions around the world. Monday’s launch is a critical step toward ramping up that constellation after prototype testing in 2023.
By Azhar
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