Dozens of people were camped out at Jetty Park Sunday evening ahead of the Monday night planned Space X Falcon 9 rocket launch and a big week on the Spacecoast. At Jetty Park, we saw families from near and far camping out and hoping for perfect views and perfect launches.
This comes ahead of a planned Friday morning test flight without crew of the Boeing Starliner to the International Space station.
If the test flight goes well, Boeing and NASA officials estimated Starliner could launch astronauts in the first part of 2020.
International Program Manager Kirk Shireman said when Starliner docks at the space station, it will be the first time the docking system is used. A similar docking mechanism will be used on NASA’s lunar gateway for the Artemis program.
After spending about a week at the space station, Starliner will return to Earth landing in White Sands, New Mexico.
NASA's other commercial crew partner, Space X, launched its crew capsule on an unmanned test flight to the ISS back in March.
"It's a great time to be out camping," said Randy Queen at Jetty Park. "Since we have the camper, we can camp out here, we can take a look at the launch and get here in plenty of time and miss the crowds."
He and his wife are already camping out and hoping to get a good view. "I want to see the night launch. That's always exciting."
Nick Misen and his wife are extending their vacation in the Orlando area just to see Monday's launch.
"It's basically a bucket list thing," said Misen. "In Europe we don't have launches like this, so this is something really nice to be apart of."
You can watch this week’s launches live this week at clickorlando.com