A blast of spaceflight history
SpaceX’s latest rocket launch reconnects with America’s proud spacefaring past.
The launch pad used to send Americans to the Moon and Space Shuttle astronauts into orbit is roaring back into action.
Dormant for nearly six years, Nasa’s Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida should see its first commercial flight this weekend. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will use it to hoist supplies to the International Space Station.
The planned launch will be SpaceX’s first from Florida since a devastating rocket explosion at a neighbouring launch pad last year. The accident prompted SpaceX to whip 39A into shape sooner than anticipated under its lease with Nasa. The pad wrecked in the September accident remains unusable.
‘‘I can tell you it’s an extraspecial launch . . . maybe extranerve-racking,’’ SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said yesterday.
Nasa built 39A, as it is commonly known, in the mid-1960s for the monstrous Saturn V Moon rockets. It was first used in 1967 for an unmanned test flight, followed by another early the next year.
Next came the astronauts, with Apollo 8 soaring to the Moon right before Christmas 1968.
The crescendo came on July 16, 1969, as Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins embarked on the first manned Moon landing. All six Apollo landings originated from 39A, as did close call Apollo 13.
Columbia made the first Space Shuttle flight from the pad on April 12, 1981, while Atlantis closed out the programme from the same spot on July 8, 2011.
This will be the 95th rocket launch from 39A. It was the departure point for 82 Space Shuttle flights and 11 Apollo missions, as well as the unmanned 1973 launch of Skylab, Nasa’s original space station.
One flight resulted in casualties. As Columbia lifted off on January 16, 2003, foam insulation from the external fuel tank broke off and gouged the left wing. Columbia and its crew were lost 16 days later during re-entry.
SpaceX signed a 20-year lease with NASA in 2014, beating out another tech billionaire’s rocket company, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Renovation work was accelerated after SpaceX’s September rocket explosion a few kilometres away at Launch Complex 40, which is on US Air Force property.
It is from pad 39A that SpaceX plans to launch Falcon rockets with ISS-bound astronauts for Nasa as early as next year. The company also might send spacecraft and, ultimately, crews to Mars from the location as well.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk noted late last week via Instagram: ‘‘We are honoured to be allowed to use it.’’
Kennedy Space Centre director Robert Cabana said yesterday that without the lease agreement, ‘‘this pad would have just sat here and rusted away in the salt air’’.