SpaceX, Elon Musk rocket toward 50th Falcon 9 launch

iridium-launch-oceanh4 — Falcon 9 satellite launches are big business for SpaceX.
SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida late Monday, Pacific time, for the 50th time since the first Falcon 9 mission less than eight years ago.

It's perhaps fitting the milestone mission will be a rather routine delivery of Hispasat 30W-6, a Spanish communications satellite, to a geostationary orbit high above the equator. Such commercial satellite missions, along with the occasional flight to resupply the International Space Station, have been the bread and butter of SpaceX's business for the past several years.

Along the way, the Falcon 9 has also pioneered the era of the reusable rocket. The company has successfully landed and recovered a Falcon 9 a total of 23 times, including two of the three boosters that made up the Falcon Heavy launch last month. Six of those 23 landings involved rockets making their second flights.

SpaceX hasn't yet released all the details of the Hispasat launch currently set for 9:33 p.m. PT Monday, so we don't know if this Falcon 9, which has not been launched before, will attempt a landing.

Technically, Monday night's launch would be the 51st time a SpaceX rocket gets off the ground, but a June 28, 2015 Falcon 9 mission to resupply the ISS failed when a fuel tank ruptured and the rocket broke up in flight just a few minutes after launch.

So if the Falcon 9 successfully makes it beyond Earth's atmosphere to deploy the Hispasat satellite it will mark the 50th trip to space for the rocket model.

In the years to come, SpaceX hopes to continue speeding up the cadence of its launches while also launching larger rockets like the Falcon Heavy that successfully sent founder Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster toward Mars and the massive "B.F.R." Musk hopes will eventually send humans to Mars and perhaps provide crazy-quick international flights.

If any of these Muskian/Martian science fiction flights of fancy ever come to pass, we'll look back and note how the road to Mars was paved with dozens of rather boring missions like Hispasat. (And perhaps someone will add that they were financed by a massive constellation of broadband satellites Musk plans to launch in the next decade.)

SpaceX typically webcasts its launches. Once that feed becomes available we'll embed it in this post so you can return and watch the Hispasat launch starting around 9:15 p.m. PT.

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