Sonic boom warning issued for SpaceX cargo mission to space station on Monday night

SpaceX is set to send a 6,000-pound resupply mission to the International Space Station on Monday night, and the rocket booster’s return trip could bring a sonic boom to parts of Central Florida.

The Falcon 9 on mission CRS-31 is scheduled to take off from Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39-A at 9:29 pm with backups on Tuesday at 9:06 pm and Wednesday at 8:44 pm.

The Space Launch Delta 45 weather team predicts a 70% chance for good launch conditions, which drops to 40% if it’s delayed until Tuesday, and 60% if it’s delayed until Wednesday.

The first booster is flying a fifth flight, having flown two crewed flights with Crew-8 in March and the Polaris Dawn flight in September as well as two Starlink flights.

It will attempt to return to the nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 1 about eight minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX warns that one or more sounds may be heard in Brevard, Orange, Osceola, Indian River, Seminole, Volusia, Polk, St. Lucie, and Okeechobee.

The cargo Dragon is making its fifth resupply mission to the ISS, and if it were to launch it would arrive after 13 hours of docking on Tuesday at 10:15 am.

It will remain tethered to the ISS until December when it will return to Earth for a blast-off, possibly one of the last times Dragon will land on the Florida coast before SpaceX changes Dragon operations. returning to California in 2025.

Among the 6,000 pounds of food, supplies and equipment are new experiments.

They include the Solar Energy Research Experiment, some Antarctic mosses to see the effects of solar radiation and microgravity on plants, a tool to test cold metals in microgravity, and research to study whether space is How does it affect different devices.

The spacecraft will dock with the ISS in a newly demolished parking lot in the forward port of the ISS’ Harmony module. Four of the seven crew members currently aboard the ISS boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom on Sunday to take it to the spaceport in Harmony and provide space for the landing of the cargo module, a process that took less than an hour.

NASA’s Starliner astronauts achieve success… technically… during SpaceX’s Dragon launch

The Dragon shuffle was significant as it marked the first time NASA astronauts flew aboard Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon. That’s because among the four crew members aboard Freedom were not only the two members who flew to the ISS in September, but also the two astronauts of NASA’s Test Flight Crew who arrived at the ISS in Boeing’s Starliner back in June.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who stayed behind on the ISS when NASA chose to return the Starliner to Earth in September to remove its crew for safety reasons, are now an official part of the SpaceX Crew-9 crew, except to be members of a group. Expedition 72 to the ISS.

They have taken two seats on the Crew Dragon Freedom which they will use when they finally reach Earth next February.

The CRS-31 launch adds to an already record-breaking year for the Space Coast, and will be the 75th from all launch providers. SpaceX will have flown 70 of those with United Launch Alliance flying the other five.

It is the 19th release from KSC for the year and 56 others from the Cape Canaveral pads.