‘The beauty of the liftoff’
SpaceX launches Es’hail-2 satellite from Kennedy Space Center, marking the first daytime launch from the Cape since May
On the sea green shores of Playalinda Beach on Thursday morning, tourists from as far as Europe rolled out their coolers, plopped down their beach chairs and marveled in the serendipity:
They happened to be visiting the Space Coast for the first daytime rocket launch to take off from here in half a year.
A small crowd trickled in throughout the morning, before the road to Playalina Beach — long a favorite rocket launch viewing site — closed to incoming traffic at noon.
On the horizon: Kennedy Space Center’s launch complex 39A, where a SpaceX rocket would later take off, carrying a communications satellite more than 22,000 miles into the sky.
“Usually you just watch it on the TV — now it’s real,” said Liberty Garcia, who is on a fiveday vacation in New Port Rich-
“It just happened! Every [launch], it’s a special moment.” Andreas Rauch
ey from snowy Ontario, Canada, with her husband. He, a rocket fan, woke them up at 5 a.m. to drive from the Gulf Coast to the Space Coast.
The plumes of smoke from a SpaceX Falcon 9 erupted into the sky at 3:46 p.m., marking the first launch the Garcias have seen in person. Most exciting, Liberty Garcia said earlier in the day, would be “the beauty of the liftoff.”
German snowbirds Andreas and Claudia Rauch also found their spot on the beach hoping to make a day out of the launch, which landed right in their fourweek Florida vacation.
“It just happened!” Andreas Rauch said of their luck. “Every [launch], it’s a special moment.”
It’s special for the Space Coast, too: Every launch since May has happened in the dark early morning. Thursday’s was the first to take place squarely in the p.m. hours.
Traveling on a Falcon 9 rocket with a reused booster into space Thursday was Es’hail-2, the second satellite from Qatar-based communications company Es’hailSat.
The satellite will provide communications, improved broadband connectivity and government services to Qatar, the Middle East and the North Africa region, according to Es’hailSat. It’ll provide needed support to Es’hail-1, which went into space in August 2013, as well as greater anti-jamming protection to ward off interference.
Most notably perhaps, the satellite will also carry with it two amateur radio antennas, marking the first time that an amateur radio transponder has been sent into geostationary orbit.
Thanks to the satellite’s position high above the equator, it’ll be able to connect amateur radio users from as far apart as Brazil and India — in a single hop and in real time.
The Falcon 9 Block 5 booster providing the thrust for the trip already launched from the Space Coast in July carrying the Telstar 19 VANTAGE communications satellite. That booster later landed on SpaceX’s drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You, in the Atlantic Ocean.
On Thursday, the booster again landed on Of Course I Still Love You about 10 minutes after liftoff, making it eligible for a potential third reuse. SpaceX has not yet reused a booster three times.
The launch was the company’s 18th this year, putting it on par with 2017’s record. With a few more launches scheduled before the year’s close, SpaceX is on track to beat that record.