An amazing SpaceX launch shot shows huge traffic on two Florida spaceports last week.
In the center of the photo taken on April 21, you can see the Falcon 9 rocket launching a batch of SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellites from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. However, this is not the only rocket.
Another SpaceX Falcon 9 on the left is the final preparation for NASA to launch the Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station. The mission successfully launched four astronauts from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Wednesday (April 27).
And on the right is NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to the moon, which has the Orion spacecraft on top of the space launch system Megarocket. In the “Wet Dress Rehearsal” test on KSC’s Pad 39B, the NASA Artemis 1 stack was dropping at its own pace. However, after several errors, the authorities on Monday (April 25) decided to remove the stack from the pad for further diagnosis in the vehicle assembly building near KSC.
NASA has spent several weeks exploring launch pads in space. In early April, Artemis 1’s wet dress rehearsal and the all-private Axiom Space Ax-1 mission launch to the space station were scheduled to take place a few hours later on the neighboring launch pad at KSC, while the crew-4 stopped in the wings. For his place. (Ax-1 finally took off on April 8 while Artemis 1 troubleshooting was on.)
Weather or technical issues can cause delays and conflicts between launches, Kathy Lloyders, NASA’s head of human spaceflight, told reporters in March that busy spaceport is a “good problem” because it represents a healthy range of missions.
The continuous lineup of missions dates back to a decade ago, when NASA’s space shuttle program was a major customer of KSC facilities. After the shuttle retired in 2011, however, the launch of the commercial space industry accelerated.
NASA and SpaceX resumed spaceflight from KSC in 2020, after nearly a decade of exclusive use of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft launched from Kazakhstan.