Let's Fly: How to Watch a Rocket Launch From Florida's Space Coast
Cape Canaveral offers front row seats to the greatest show on Earth just about every week, but there are a few things to know before heading to the Sunshine State.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Watching a space launch from a few miles away is an epic experience with one downside: the certainty that the rest of your day will not be as awesome.
That’s because watching a launch on TV does not prepare you for the light-then-sound spectacle of a giant rocket igniting, incinerating gravity’s pull, and throwing a payload or people into space. First it becomes the brightest thing in sight, then it becomes the loudest thing nearby.
It is easily one of the greatest shows on Earth, and it’s also become one of the most frequent on the Space Coast.
Unlike 10 or 20 years ago, you don’t have to plan a trip months in advance. We are living in a new golden age of space travel, with rockets lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center and the adjacent Cape Canaveral Space Force Center as often as every week—sometimes more often.
Cape Cartography
Walt Disney World keeps central Florida a highly competitive travel market, so you can often book a flight to Orlando International Airport, a rental car, and lodging near the Cape on short notice without paying a fortune.
But once you’ve picked out a launch that seems worth a trip—the launch calendars maintained by Florida Today and the Space Coast tourism office are good places to start—securing a good viewing spot will require its own advance planning, especially among the Kennedy Space Center’s public viewing areas.
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers the bonus of inspecting a leftover Saturn V rocket, suspended from the ceiling of this hangar-sized building. Everyday admission costs $75 for one day or $89 for two days (with a $10 discount for kids 3-11), but for special events you can expect to pay a premium for a launch viewing package.
For example, tickets to see the Oct. 13 launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe to one of Jupiter’s most interesting moons on a Falcon Heavy rocket cost $250. I would have happily paid that, but a) I’m not normal and b) I already had travel booked that sadly did not involve any rockets.
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Musk: SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Is 'Tripping Me Out'
Falcon Heavy is the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, and on Tuesday, it completed a successful test flight.
SpaceX on Tuesday completed a successful test flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which also released Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster into space.
Falcon Heavy earns its name; it's "the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, with the ability to lift more than twice the payload of the next vehicle, at one-third the cost," according to SpaceX.
It's not exactly cheap, though. In a Tuesday evening press conference, SpaceX chief Elon Musk estimated that Falcon Heavy development has cost about half a billion dollars thus far. And it almost never happened; Musk said he contemplated canceling the Falcon Heavy project at least three times "because it was like, 'man, this was way harder than we thought.'" But persistence paid off.
As for why Musk's Tesla Roadster was along for the ride, Musk said test payloads are usually something "boring" like blocks of concrete. The car, complete with a spacesuit-wearing mannequin, "is something that's going to get people excited around the world."
SpaceX is currently broadcasting a live stream of the Roadster and its passenger, dubbed Starman. "You can tell it's real because it looks so fake," Musk quipped. "It's kind of silly and fun, but I think silly, fun things are important."
As for the launch itself, "it's still tripping me out," Musk said Tuesday. "I'm tripping balls here."
AST SpaceMobile Successfully Launches First Satellites
AST SpaceMobile, a competitor to Starlink's satellite system for phones, has launched its first batch of commercial satellites into Earth's orbit.
After some delay, AST SpaceMobile has finally sent its first commercial satellites into orbit, advancing the company’s effort to bring satellite internet to AT&T and Verizon phones.
On early Thursday morning at 4:52 am EST, the company’s “BlueBird” satellites flew into space onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“And we have liftoff of the BlueBird 1-5 mission, and the dawn of a new era for mobile connectivity,” AST SpaceMobile’s head of content Dave Mosher said on the live stream.
About an hour later into the launch, SpaceX reported the Falcon 9 rocket had successfully deployed all five BlueBird satellites into low-Earth orbit.
Each BlueBird satellites is carrying what AST SpaceMobile says is the world’s largest communication array, measuring at 700 square feet. The large array enables the satellites to efficiently relay data from Earth, turning each BlueBird into an orbiting cell tower in space that can harness 5G spectrum.
AST SpaceMobile has been working on the satellites to help carriers worldwide serve users in cellular dead zones. The technology can power video calls and internet downloads as fast as 21Mbps to unmodified smartphones, according to earlier tests with the company's first prototype satellite.
Despite their large size, the BlueBirds were neatly packed into the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once deployed in Earth’s orbit, the satellites will then unfold their communication arrays, which also feature solar panels to receive energy from the Sun. AST SpaceMobile’s CEO Abel Avellan added that the company has achieved communication with all five BlueBird satellites.
The company, which has received investment from AT&T, Verizon and Google, plans on kicking off beta tests with the BlueBird satellites as soon as this December. However, AST SpaceMobile will need to launch between 45 to 60 commercial satellites before it can offer continuous coverage to the US, which will likely take several more months, if not a year or longer.
During the live stream, AST SpaceMobile also said the company is working on even more powerful satellites that’ll be three-times larger than the current BlueBird model. But the company isn’t alone in trying to power satellite connectivity to phones. AST SpaceMobile is poised to compete with SpaceX’s own cellular satellite system through Starlink, which is slated to launch later this fall through T-Mobile.
NASA's Space Shuttle Program: A Look Back
NASA's 30-year shuttle program is coming to an end. We take a look back.
Shuttle Atlantis on Friday successfully launched for the last time and is now zooming toward the International Space Station for a 12-day mission that will bring NASA's 30-year shuttle program to a close.
When Atlantis returns to Earth in about two weeks, NASA will retire its shuttle program in order to focus on deep-space exploration. Trips to the ISS will shift to a commercial focus, and the orbiters from Enterprise, Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis will be shipped off to various museums throughout the country.
The shuttle era started on April 12, 1981 with Columbia. It was manned by Commander John W. Young and Pilot Robert L. Crippen and lasted two days. The second flight, also aboard Columbia, occurred in November 1981 and there were two dozen successful shuttle launches before the tragic Challenger explosion in 1986. After the disaster, the shuttle program took a two-year break before returning with an all-veteran crew for the September 29, 1988 launch of Discovery.
The December 1998 STS-88 mission via shuttle Endeavour started construction on the ISS; the first crew arrived at the station in 2000. In 2003, tragedy struck again, when the Columbia orbiter suffered a catastrophic failure upon re-entry, killing the crew about 15 minutes before their scheduled touchdown in Florida.
In all, however, the five orbiters — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — have flown more than 130 times and carried over 350 people into space. They traveled more than half a billion miles, which NASA said is more than enough to reach Jupiter.
"Designed to return to Earth and land like a giant glider, the shuttle was the world's first reusable space vehicle," NASA said. "More than all of that, though, the shuttle program expanded the limits of human achievement and broadened our understanding of our world."
Guides such as Launch Photography consistently point to Playalinda Beach on Canaveral National Seashore, east of Titusville and north of 39A, as a next-best and much-cheaper option: A car day pass runs $25. If the beach is open for a launch (don’t count on that for crewed missions) during the beach’s daylight open hours, the closest parking lot is 3.6 miles from that pad.
Countdown Considerations
Launch-viewing logistics have to factor in the risk of the launch getting delayed or scrubbed for a variety of hard-to-predict reasons. Sensors can indicate a fault in its engines or plumbing, the weather may not cooperate, or you may have the especially annoying “boat in the box” range safety violation (as in, some bozo lingers in the offshore area designated as off-limits to mariners during a launch for their own protection).
Study the launch commit criteria for the mission on your calendar carefully. Uncrewed Falcon 9 launches should have the lowest risk of complications, while the criteria for crewed missions are stricter because of the need to ensure a safe landing of the Dragon capsule if necessary.
NASA’s Space Launch System, meanwhile, was an enormously temperamental machine before its November 2022 launch from 39B. But with the next SLS launch not penciled in until late 2026 at best, seeing that shuttle-derived rocket fly isn’t a short-term consideration.
Plan your travel with an extra day of margin in case of a scrub. And no matter what, do not buy a non-changeable basic economy ticket.
Pictures Because it Did Happen
If you’ve never seen a launch before, don't go crazy taking pictures of it. Get a couple of photos with your phone but otherwise live in the moment: This isn’t something to see through a smartphone screen or a camera viewfinder.
If you brought binoculars, save them for inspecting the pad in the minutes before launch. Put them down and put your camera away as the countdown reaches the last 30 seconds—the heart-in-your-throat moments of the experience.
🤣🤣🤣 this was a very good one, after watching something like this, your day will definitely not get any cooler