SpaceX Puts Spacex Rocket Launch Back on Wednesday After Weather Scrub
SpaceX planned a Wednesday spacex rocket launch of its Falcon Heavy from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after Monday’s attempt was scrubbed because of poor weather. Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A was scheduled for 10:13 a.m. EDT, with the six metric ton ViaSat-3 F3 set to ride to geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The launch window ran 85 minutes, and the 45th Weather Squadron put the chance of favorable weather at 90 percent. Thick clouds were the main weather concern for the attempt, leaving SpaceX with a short window to get the rocket off the pad.
Falcon Heavy at Kennedy Space Center
The mission is Falcon Heavy’s 12th flight, and the rocket debuted in 2018. SpaceX planned to land the side boosters, tail numbers 1072 and 1075, at Landing Zone 2 and Landing Zone 40. Booster 1072 was flying for a second time, while booster 1075 was flying for a 22nd time.
SpaceX said it would not try to recover the brand new core stage booster B1098. The core stage was to be discarded in the Atlantic Ocean, while the side boosters were expected to come back to separate landing sites about ten miles apart.
ViaSat-3 F3 and airline WiFi
ViaSat-3 F3 is the third and final satellite in the ViaSat-3 series, and Dave Abrahamian, Viasat’s vice president of Satellite Systems, said the spacecraft will support more free airborne WiFi for airline customers as it enters service. He said, “As the spacecraft enters service, I think what you’re going to see is more and more of our airline customers providing free use of airborne WiFi. And with recent updates to the networks and everything, a number of those have enabled free streaming.”
Abrahamian said, “You can stream Netflix at 4K in the sky.” He added, “When we started many, many years ago with ViaSat-1, you couldn’t do that.” He said, “Just being able to get basic SMS or email service in the air was a big deal, but now we’re up to streaming in 4K.”
Orbit raising after deployment
Deployment of the spacecraft was expected nearly five hours after liftoff. Abrahamian said orbit raising to the operating position at 158.55 degrees East along the equator would take about two months, and it would take at least a couple of months after that for deployment stages and checkouts before Boeing hands the vehicle over to Viasat.
He said, “Falcon Heavy is a more powerful vehicle than Atlas 5 was, so they can put us in a more favorable transfer orbit for the electric propulsion.” Abrahamian also said, “So they’re going to drop us off in an orbit, hopefully, that is just below [geostationary Earth orbit] apogee-wise, about 23,000 kilometers perigee-wise, and only about three degrees of inclination. So, it’s a very [electric propulsion]-friendly orbit.”
ViaSat-3 F2, launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 in November 2025, was still completing on-orbit checkout and was slated to begin operational service in the near future.
