The current mission of Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX to launch the spy craft has been forecasted cloudy both regarding weather as well as situation. The Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is gearing up for the launch of its 13th Falcon 9 rocket which will be carrying the U.S.’s secret spy vehicle X-37B into the orbit. The Falcon 9 is slated to take-off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, Florida on Thursday. But a cloud of mystery revolves around Elon Musk and his SpaceX company due to two reasons. First, is the purpose of the pay load that it is carrying on behalf of the U.S. military and second is the dilemma of launching the space vehicle because of the severe weather conditions that occurred due to the upcoming Hurricane Irma.
Through information collected from Patrick Air Force Base, it is revealed that after striking the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, Irma is now just about 900 miles southeast of the launch site where the scheduled take off is going to happen on Thursday. The website of the base on Wednesday informed that there would be big thick clouds present in the atmosphere due to the storm and predicted a 40-60 percent chance of the launch of X-37B on Thursday.
Although SpaceX has kept Friday as a backup day for the launch, situations are expected to worsen on that day. If SpaceX battles the remorse weather successfully, then it is for the first time that the company will carry the secret Air-force space drone which has already completed a successful mission of one year in orbit. This is going to be the fifth mission of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which is an autonomous aircraft touted to be 20 percent of the size of the retired Space Shuttle.
No one knows what the 11,000-pound secret vehicle made by Boeing Co. Contains. Recently in May, the X-37B spy craft returned to earth after completing 700 days in space.
According to SpaceX, the launch time is scheduled between 9:50 am and 2:55 pm on Thursday. Then it will try to land the rockets first stage on land for reuse. In May 2015, SpaceX grabbed the U.S. Air Force certification for national security space mission and broke the long-held pact of its rival, the United Launch Alliance. Previous four missions of the X-37B was carried out in Atlas 5 rocket of the United Launch Alliance.
Brian Weeden, the director of program planning for Secure World Foundation, told that launching X-37B will not cost too much for SpaceX as the secret craft is launched once every few years but from this the mission the Air Force will get benefitted. SpaceX is planning to fly 20 to 24 missions in 2017 which includes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as commercial satellite operators.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has signed a $4.2 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station using an unmanned Dragon spacecraft and also to transport astronauts to ISS through a Dragon version space craft.
