This afternoon’s much-anticipated launch from the Kennedy Space Center of a SpaceX rocket in cooperation with NASA was called a 50-50 proposition early Wednesday, owing to weather conditions on central Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Watch MarketWatch’s live stream of the launch here:
The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft, currently slated for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time, would mark a noteworthy milestone for NASA’s commercial crew program, a partnership among the federal space agency; the privately held Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded by Tesla Inc.
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Chief Executive Elon Musk and, of course, better known as SpaceX; and Boeing Co.
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Public interest in the takeoff was expected to be “extremely high,” coming as it does in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and with stay-at-home orders and quarantines in place around much of the world, analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note last month.
It represents the first launch of astronauts — the two-man crew is composed of Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — into space from U.S. soil in nearly a decade, and the first-ever launch of astronauts into Earth’s orbit by a private company.
If weather precludes the Wednesday launch, the next opportunity would come this Saturday, and Sunday would serve as a backup to that.