Tomorrow evening, Elon Musk’s interplanetary space travel company, SpaceX, will launch a Falcon 9 rocket, its third in a 10-day span.
On Sunday, SpaceX is launching its third rocket in 10 days
Space is the place.
Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images
The rocket will be sending a communications satellite, the Intelsat 35e, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida into a geostationary orbit, some 23,000 miles above Earth.
SpaceX will not attempt to land the Falcon 9’s rocket booster for reuse after this launch, the company said in a statement. This may be because the payload is so heavy and it’s going into such a high orbit that the mission requires more fuel, which won’t leave the rocket with enough to make it back to land.
Watch the launch live Sunday at 7:36 pm ET / 4:36 pm PT here:
Last Sunday, June 25, SpaceX sent a new Falcon 9 rocket into space to deliver a set of Iridium satellites.
That launch came just two days after SpaceX launched a rocket that Friday, which was the second time in the company’s history it successfully landed a recycled rocket. The rocket booster returned to Earth to land on SpaceX’s drone ship, named “Of Course I Still Love You.”
Reusing rockets is central to SpaceX’s mission to lower the cost of space travel. Musk, after all, wants space travel to become cheap enough for humans to one day colonize Mars. But rockets are typically too damaged after launching to be used again, and building a rocket can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
For perspective on the cost of space travel, take what happened in 2015 when a Falcon 9 disintegrated after takeoff. SpaceX lost around $260 million with that mission, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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