SpaceX scrubbed the Spacex Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch on Monday, April 27, because of poor weather, delaying a mission that had been scheduled to lift off at 10:21 a.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Dave Abrahamian, who has worked on the ViaSat-3 program for more than a decade, watched the clock. The launch window was 85 minutes long; the mission would have carried a six-metric-ton ViaSat-3 Flight 3 satellite to a geosynchronous transfer orbit and — if all had gone to plan — the satellite was expected to deploy from the rocket’s upper stage nearly five hours after liftoff.
The scrub came despite a forecast by the 45th Weather Squadron that gave a 70 percent chance of favorable weather for the window. Meteorologists had been specifically watching for violations of the cumulus cloud and surface electric fields rules, and those limits ultimately forced controllers to stand down.
This flight would have been the first Falcon Heavy launch in more than a year and a half and the 12th flight of the heavy-lift vehicle since its debut in 2018. SpaceX had planned to recover the two side boosters — tail numbers 1072 and 1075 — at Landing Zone 2 and Landing Zone 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while the center core, B1098, was to be expended into the Atlantic Ocean.
For the ViaSat team, the delay is a setback in a program Abrahamian described as having occupied much of his career. He said the work on the ViaSat-3 program has stretched over more than 10 years and that the satellite market has shifted dramatically during that time — from a handful of satellites in orbit to a different commercial landscape following two prior ViaSat-3 launches and a corporate merger that changed the operator’s footprint.
Abrahamian also stressed the technical upside of the planned vehicle: Falcon Heavy can place the payload into a more favorable transfer orbit than Atlas 5, he said, which matters because the satellite relies on electric propulsion to reach its final operating slot at 158.55 degrees East along the equator; that orbit raising was expected to take about two months once the satellite was released.
The mission also carried operational trade-offs: SpaceX intended to accept loss of the center core while recovering both side boosters — a profile that shows how Falcon Heavy mixes reusable and expendable elements to meet performance needs for heavy communications satellites. The launch would have used Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, but SpaceX has not announced a new launch date.
The scrub exposes the narrow margins that govern big launches. The Eastern Range is also balancing other logistics on the schedule, including the timing of unloading a core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System from the Pegasus barge, a factor that can complicate range availability and push tentative slots further out.
For Abrahamian and the team that has shepherded the final ViaSat-3 satellite, the scrub is a pause on a program that has taken more than a decade to bring to this point. The hardware is ready; the weather is not. When the sky clears, the mission will not only resume a long campaign but also begin the roughly two-month journey to its operating home at 158.55 degrees East.
