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Elon Musk's SpaceX was about to launch a new spy satellite for the US military, marking what the space transportation company declared to be its first designated national security mission for the United States.
FILE PHOTO – A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (centrally, in a horizontal position), ready to be launched for an International Space Station supply mission on 39A historic launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral , Florida (United States), February 17, 2017. REUTERS / Joe Skipper
ORLANDO, Florida: Elon Musk's SpaceX was about to launch a new spy satellite for the US military, marking what the space transportation company declared to be its first designated national security mission for the United States.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a GPS satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida shortly after 9 am (1700 GMT), the US Air Force announced.
The launch of Tuesday, if successful, would be a victory for Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who has been trying for years to break into the market for lucrative military space launches, long dominated by the historic Lockheed and Boeing operators. Co.
SpaceX filed a lawsuit against the US Air Force in 2014 to protest the military's awarding a multi-billion dollar non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches at United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed.
SpaceX dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open the competition, according to the SpaceX website.
Next year, SpaceX won an $ 83 million contract to launch the 15-year-old GPS satellite, spokesman William Russell said.
Tuesday's launch is the first of Lockheed's 32 satellites in production under contracts worth a total of US $ 12.6 billion for the Army's GPS III program. air, said Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder.
US Vice President, Mike Pence, tweeted on the tweet that he would be heading to Florida to attend the launch, which he described as "a big step forward in the search for leadership." American in the space ".
"Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new features to users, including accuracy three times greater and anti-jamming capabilities up to eight times greater," said Russell.
The next GPS III satellite will be launched in mid-2019, said Eschenfelder, while the following satellites would be tested in the company's processing facilities in Colorado.
The launch marks the first so-called "national security in space" mission defined by the US military, SpaceX said.
The company based in Hawthorne, California, had previously launched payloads for the Department of Defense in 2017 that were not designated as national security missions.
(Joey Roulette report in Orlando, Florida, edited by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle and Michael Perry)
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