🚀 Falcon Heavy to launch weather satellite tomorrow!

Good Monday morning, friends. It’s your Space Coast correspondent James Sparvero looking ahead to what we can expect to be another thrilling launch.

Tuesday night at 5:16 p.m., SpaceX opens a two-hour launch window for a crowd favorite, the Falcon Heavy. It will be the 10th flight of one of the most powerful rockets we’ve ever seen (a rocket we first watched attract hundreds of thousands to our shores back in 2018)

This time, SpaceX’s triple-core creation is carrying NASA and NOAA’s latest in their GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) series, the GOES-U. The weather satellite is the fourth and final satellite in the series NASA says is helping improve forecasts, predict severe weather, detect lightning and study weather in space.

With one of its new instruments, NASA says GOES-U will watch the outermost layer of the sun, the corona, for plasma explosions. In a press conference coming up this morning at 11, I expect NASA scientists to tell us how the sun can produce geomagnetic solar storms that can be to a hazard to all kinds of activity in space from satellites to missions with astronauts.

We’ll broadcast the launch Tuesday live on ClickOrlando.com. Enjoy and have a great week!

📧 Have any topics you’d like to discuss? Send me an email here.

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👋 Here’s a little bit more about me.

Little did I know when watching Apollo 13 in the third grade that 20 years later, I was destined for a thrilling career as your Space Coast multimedia journalist.

Chemistry and biology weren’t so interesting to me in high school science, but I loved my Earth and Space class (Thanks, Mr. Lang).

Then in 2016, I traded Capitol correspondent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for space correspondent. I’m proud that my first live report at News 6 happened to be the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a barge. What seems so routine now was a really big deal that day in our newsroom!

From there, I’ve covered the Commercial Crew program and the return of human spaceflight to Kennedy Space Center (Demo-2 launched on my 33rd birthday!)

Now, as our coverage looks forward to missions to the moon and Mars, I often tell others I have the best job in local news. Because after all I’ve seen so far, I think I would be bored working somewhere else. I even bought a house near the Cape with a great view to the north so I never miss a launch even when I’m not working.

After eight years on the beat, though, I still consider myself a young space reporter and I always look forward to learning something new with every assignment.

Have a great launch into the rest of your week!