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Watch live tonight as SpaceX launches a satellite the size of a double-decker bus into space

The satellite weighs 13,500 pounds.

SpaceX: The Privately Funded Aerospace Company Founded By Elon Musk
SpaceX: The Privately Funded Aerospace Company Founded By Elon Musk
Photo by NASA via Getty Images

Elon Musk’s interplanetary travel company, SpaceX, is launching another of its Falcon 9 rockets into space Monday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The rocket will carry a massive telecoms satellite for the British company Inmarsat, which will be added to Inmarsat’s network of satellites already in space that beam broadband internet to ships at sea and airplanes that provide in-air Wi-Fi.

This particular satellite, the Inmarsat-5 F4, is the one of the largest payloads SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has carried to date. It weighs nearly 13,500 pounds and has solar arrays that stretch out wider than 130 feet, surpassing the wingspan of a Boeing 737 airplane. Its body stands nearly 23 feet tall, about the length of a double-decker bus.

Watch the rocket blast off live at 7:21 pm ET tonight right here:

Unlike previous launches with the Falcon 9, this time SpaceX isn’t planning to attempt a landing on one of its robotic ships. That’s because the satellite SpaceX is heaving into space tonight is supposed to hit a high orbit over 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, and that will take a lot of fuel, meaning there won’t likely be enough left to also make a landing upon return.

Landing and reusing rockets is core to SpaceX’s mission to one day make space flight more affordable. Rockets are typically too damaged after launching to be used again, and building a new rocket can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

SpaceX is also finally starting to get to its desired pace of sending a rocket into space every two to three weeks. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters she hoped the company would get to a point where it was launching rockets that regularly in February.

Its last rocket launch was two weeks ago, when the Falcon 9 successfully landed after sending a military satellite into space. The next blast off is scheduled for two weeks from now on June 1, when yet another Falcon 9 will venture into space to restock supplies for the International Space Station.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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