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[Update: launch occurred on time, first stage separation and landing were successful, satellite release into orbit successful. And it IS rocket science that they made look easy. --martyb]
Spacex Will Attempt to Make a Historic West Coast Landing Sunday Night:
This will be SpaceX's 17th launch attempt this year.
[...] On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the "Landing Zone 4" facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.
[...] This will be SpaceX's 17th launch attempt this year, bringing the company close to tying its record-setting pace of 18 launches last year. With as many as half a dozen launch attempts left this year, SpaceX should easily surpass its 2017 total, barring a major accident.
This Block 5 first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket has previously flown once before, launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites into a polar orbit 625km above the Earth. It returned to a drone ship off the West Coast after that flight. The payload launching Sunday night, the SAOCOM 1A satellite for Argentina's Space Agency, weighs less than a lot of the Falcon 9 payloads launched into a Sun synchronous orbit several hundred kilometers above the Earth. Therefore, the first stage will have ample fuel to return to the new coastal landing site.
SpaceX is also likely to try and retrieve one-half of the Falcon 9 rocket's payload fairing. It has come close to catching these before with its large, catcher's-mitt shaped net attached to a boat, but it has yet to succeed.
SpaceFlightNow reports:
Launch time: Approx. 0221 GMT on 8th (10:22 p.m. EDT; 7:22 p.m. PDT on 7th)
Launch site: SLC-4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the SAOCOM 1A for CONAE, Argentina's space agency. SAOCOM 1A is the first of two SAOCOM 1-series Earth observation satellites designed to provide radar imagery to help emergency responders and monitor the environment, including the collection of soil moisture measurements.
Launch will be live streamed on YouTube starting approximately 15 minutes before launch. Backup launch time is on Thursday.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @09:10PM
There actually are some very big differences. Like you probably know the way you get things into orbit is not by going vertically high, but by going horizontally fast. So fast you keep falling, but miss the surface. The ISS for instance is constantly falling to Earth but as it's moving 27,600 km/hour it's ends up missing the earth in a never ending cycle - that's what orbit is. The reason things go high in the sky is to get out of the atmosphere. In Earth's atmosphere not only would you burn to a cinder going 27,600km/h but it'd also constantly slow you down, so you'd eventually start 'not missing' the ground anymore. By contrast on something like the moon where there's no atmosphere, you could orbit at 5 feet above the ground and be perfectly fine so long as there was nothing poking up more than 5 feet above the ground. Which there is. So you couldn't. But it's a fun thought anyhow.
Okkk then! The point of that is that when you launch you generally want to go eastward. Why? Because the Earth rotates towards the east at about 1,670km/h. What this means is that when you launch, headed east, you gain a 'free' orbital boost of 1,670km/h. Go west and you're starting at effectively -1,670km/h. So now go look at some famous launch locations like Cape Canaveral, Florida or Kourou, French Guiana or SpaceX's one they're building in Boca Chica, TX. What you'll see is they have stuff on the west and oceans on the east. The reason for this is rockets also have a habit of going boom. When you have populated areas to the east this greatly increases the risk from catastrophic failure of a rocket. And for companies/governments that throw away their rockets after one use, the ocean is also used as a giant garbage dump. Imagine NASA dropping those giant booster rockets on the side of the Space Shuttle over LA from 67km in the sky, parachute or not. Some might consider that a good idea. Many, probably. But I suspect most living in LA would not. So we don't.
The moral of this story is that orbital dynamics are fun! And that we need more west launch sites... many more.