SpaceX Falcon Heavy primed to finish double launch day with midnight sonic booms

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Oct 1, 2026

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The Space Coast saw only one launch in all of September, but if weather holds Thursday, it could see two in just one day with a SpaceX Falcon Heavy primed to lift off from Kennedy Space Center following the launch earlier in the day of the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station.

Falcon Heavy is aiming for liftoff from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A on the NROL-97 mission at 11:53 p.m. carrying a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office.

Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecast a 60% chance for good conditions at the launch site, the same in the event of a 24-hour delay. Friday’s backup launch time would be 11:48 p.m.

If it flies, it will be the 58th launch from all providers on the Space Coast this year.

It marks only the 14th ever launch of SpaceX’s powerhouse rocket, which is essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, but it’s the third so far in 2026. It produces 5.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

About eight minutes after launch, the two side boosters will attempt a return to neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zones 1 and 2.

SpaceX issued a sonic boom advisory for the boosters’ returns.

“There is the possibility that residents of Brevard, Orange, Osceola, Indian River, Seminole, Volusia, Polk, St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties may hear one or more sonic booms during the landing, but what residents experience will depend on weather and other conditions,” SpaceX warned in its media advisory.

Their return would mark the second and third sonic booms of the day after Crew-13’s booster made a return to Landing Zone 40. It’s the first time all three landing zones have been tapped for use at the same time.

The Falcon Heavy boosters are making their second and fourth trips to space, both of which most recently flew on Aug. 30 on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch.

SpaceX has limited its use of KSC’s Launch Complex 39-A to just Falcon Heavy launches this year having shifted all of Florida’s Falcon 9 launches to Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40.

That has allowed SpaceX to focus on completing work on the Starship and Super Heavy launch tower adjacent the Falcon Heavy launch pad. SpaceX is also building two more towers at Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 37.

During the post-launch news conference for Crew-13 earlier Thursday, Juliana Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of Dragon Human Spaceflight, said Florida’s first Starship launch from KSC could still come before the end of the year.

“We intend to do at least one more launch from Starbase before our next launch out of the Cape, and we always look at flight data and look at how the mission went to inform our next steps, and so that’s what we’ll be doing before we make a plan for coming to the Cape,” she said.

The heavy-lift rocket is more than three times as powerful as Falcon Heavy producing nearly 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. It so far has made 14 launch attempts including the most recent this past Monday during which it made it to orbit for the first time.

“We have a lot of work that we need to go execute on Starship,” Scheiman said. “We need to continue to demonstrate reusability on Starship, recovering the ship, recovering the booster, and reusing those.”

She said preparation is going very well at 39-A.

“We’ve essentially done a lot of the initial build of the structures and the systems needed for launching Starship, and we’re beginning to step into the sort of acceptance testing and operational testing prior to activation, so we’re kind of through the main construction and going into the proofing, testing, and activation testing,” she said.

Lori Glaze, associate administrator of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said the agency has been preparing for that moment as well, as NASA is counting on Starship to launch as part of next year’s Artemis III mission as one of three rockets to fly concurrently alongside NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

“We’re also working with SpaceX and on our side as well to help support and make sure that we’re ready as well when they’re ready to bring Starship here,” she said. “We want to be able to do thumbs up and say, ‘Yeah, we’re all ready to go together on Starship.'”