CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – For decades it has stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching more than 400 feet high. The kings and queens of the cosmos — astronauts from Apollo and the shuttle eras, including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — have zipped to the top of its tower in an elevator to get one last view of the waves lapping the Florida coast before launching violently into space.
But then in 2011, when the space shuttle was retired and NASA could no longer fly humans into space, NASA’s Launch Complex 39A went dormant, a symbol of a once-great era rusting away in the salt air.
Now the venerable site is about to come back to life. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX, the commercial space venture founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the pad on Saturday morning, the first since the shuttle era.
While SpaceX has plans to eventually fly NASA astronauts from 39A, Saturday’s launch will have no passengers and instead will carry 5,500 pounds of cargo and experiments for the International Space Station.
The pad hosted six of the Apollo lunar launches, including Apollo 11, the first mission to land humans on the moon. And it was also the stage for many shuttle missions, earning it a place on the National Register of Historic Places.
In an interview last year, Musk said he was grateful to be able to lease the site. Red Huber, Tns – Tns A Space X Falcon9 rocket is readied for launch Friday, Feb. 17, 2017 on launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch scheduled for Saturday to the International Space Station will be the first launch from the historic re-fitted launch pad since Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2011.
“I think it’s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,” he said. “I would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.”
The resurrection of 39A, which SpaceX has spent years renovating, is yet another step in the transformation of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center into what officials here call a “multi-user space port.” NASA and the Air Force, which operates the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, have leased out large swaths of the area to commercial companies that are taking over roles that traditionally were the exclusive domain of the government.
NASA, meanwhile, is focusing on deep space exploration. Its monster rocket, the Space Launch System, which it plans to fly around the moon in 2018, would launch from Launch Complex 39B. (While that flight was initially supposed to be without passengers, NASA is now exploring the possibility of putting astronauts on board.)
But signs of the private sector’s emergence are all over this place, with corporate symbols rising alongside NASA’s logo and the American flag. Boeing, which along with SpaceX is under contract by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has revamped Launch Complex 41 and has taken over a former shuttle processing facility. After competing unsuccessfully against SpaceX for pad 39A, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here.
Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA said that SpaceX’s launch from 39A will “mark a turning point for Kennedy’s transition to a multi-user spaceport geared to support public and private missions.”
About 10 minutes after the launch, scheduled for 10:01 a.m. Saturday, SpaceX will once again attempt to land its booster on a landing pad it had built here. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls “flight proven,” for the first time.
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