SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches for the Thales mission. (Photo : SpaceX)
SpaceX's launch was postponed from Sunday as the private space company moved the attempt to Monday, of its newly upgraded Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 will attempt to land vertically again as CEO Elon Musk believes that this risky touchdown will have better success rates in 24 hours.
This smooth landing is now more crucial than ever for Hawthorne, California based Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, to cut down costs during launches by refurbishing and reusing its rockets.
This mission is now rescheduled to 8:33 P.M. EST on Monday, which marks the first orbital mission of SpaceX since the last mission that failed last June 28 where the Falcon 9 rocket attempted to deliver cargo resupply to the International Space Station under NASA, ending in a fiery explosion.
Musk revealed on Twitter how Monday night will have a higher chance of good landing by 10 percent, punting 24 hours. He tweeted this after a few hours of Sunday's scheduled liftoff of 8:29 PM EST.
The newly improved rocket is set to carry 11 communications satellites for ORBCOMM which provides messaging services for retailers and shipping containers among others.
The new Falcon 9 rocket is believed to be 30 percent more powerful than the previous SpaceX rocket models, where it comes equipped with a robust landing system. Its nine engine main stage will attempt again to land just a few miles away from the launch site, on a special landing pad off Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
However CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos was the first to be successful in vertically landing a rocket for his new private space company known as Blue Origin, during a landing test last month. Blue Origin is still in the process of conducting test flights where SpaceX already has a backlog of more than 60 launches costing US $8 billion.
SpaceX is still determined to experiment and land a successful rocket on their floating autonomous barge unfortunately, all of them so far were unsuccessful.
