SpaceX Targets Thursday Afternoon To Launch, Land Falcon 9 With Thaicom8

SpaceX may test a Falcon 9 rocket's engines on Monday to prepare it for a planned blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday at 5:40 p.m. The event will be to launch a Thai communications satellite and will have an attempt to land a rocket after the launch.

This launch will most likely look like SpaceX's May 6 launch of a Japanese communications satellite; however this will be done much earlier than that of the May 6^th launch. According to wstp.com, the Thaicom 8 satellite weighs an estimated mass of about 6,834 lbs (3,100 kg) and was built by Orbital ATK. It will transmit TV channels and Internet services to Thailand, India and parts of Africa from a position of 22,300 miles (35,888 kilometers) above the equator. And is based on the flight-proven GEOStar-2 satellite platform.The spacecraft is destined to reside at 78.5 degrees East Longitude and carry a Ku-band payload (comprised of 24 active transponders).

Orbital ATK was chosen by Thaicom PLC to build the satellite which is planned to have an operational life of about 15 years. The GEOStar-2 platform was designed to be compatible with all major commercial launch vehicles. Orbital ATK's description of the GEOStar-2 design emphasized that it is best used for "smaller" satellite missions with the capability of providing at least 5.0 kilowatts of payload power, Space Flight Insider reported.

After separating from the rocket's upper stage, the Falcon 9 booster will plunge toward an unpiloted SpaceX "drone ship" that will be floating offshore in the Atlantic Ocean with the hopes of making 3 consecutive missions with successful booster landings at sea. Since Falcon 9 flies faster on missions that launches communications satellites to higher orbits, it increases landings' degree of difficulty.

The launch is SpaceX's fifth this year, and the 25th by a Falcon 9 since its debut in 2010, including one failure last summer.