KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – Under stellar Florida skies, a private SpaceX Falcon 9 took flight overnight and flawlessly delivered the commercial EchoStar 23 television satellite to geosynchronous orbit after high winds delayed the rockets roar to orbit by two days from Tuesday. The EchoStar XXIII payload was a remarkably heavy satellite compared to many of SpaceX’s cargo passengers for a Falcon 9 rocket, and that means that SpaceX did not attempt to recover the first stage of its rocket for this particular launch, as with its previous two since returning to flight earlier this year following last September’s pre-flight rocket explosion mishap. However SpaceX said it will not attempt to land Falcon 9’s first stage after launch “due to mission requirements.” The mission took off from NASA’s historic launchpad 39A, the origin of the pioneering US spaceflights that took astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the space shuttle missions that ran from 1981 to 2011.
SpaceX successfully launches the EchoStar 23 satellite, a Direct-to-home television broadcast services for Brazil, into a geosynchronous transfer orbit, using the fully expendable version of their Falcon 9 launch vehicle.