A Space Coast Special Day

Perhaps some of you are unaware that this area on the East Coast adopted the name of The Space Coast, as other coastal areas around the state have adopted other nicknames.  It's essentially the oceanside areas in Brevard County, where the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Stations are both located.  There's only a relative handful of areas in the world where you can go outside and watch rocket launches from your yard, and this is one of them. 

We were treated to a doubleheader today. 

The first launch was midday of Koreasat-6A bound for the Geosynchronous orbit where many communications satellites like this are sent.  Launch was 12:25 PM EST or 1725 UTC.  The SpaceX Tweet to X once the mission was clearly in the books is at that link, that has four pretty pictures. 

Something that I still consider very impressive is that this was the 23rd flight of this booster:

This was the 23rd flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13G, O3B mPOWER, PSN SATRIA, Telkomsat Marah Putih 2, Galileo L13, and 12 Starlink missions. 

The booster did a Return To Launch Site landing instead of on one of the drone ships, and there's a pretty pic of that in that X link above.  Whenever I hear of some booster making it's 23rd flight, I recall the discussions of whether or not they'd ever get 10 flights out of a Falcon 9 booster.  While 23 is currently the group leaders, there's more than a few that have made it.

Later in the day we got to see a launch group 6-69 of Starlink satellites that had been delayed a couple of times for weather in the recovery zone.  Launch was a 4:28 PM EST, 2128 UTC. This booster was "middle-aged" for a Falcon 9, this was its 12th mission. Landing was on ASOG - drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas - about 8 minutes after launch. 

The novelty was that for the first time in months, we had a combination of  virtually cloudless skies and a trajectory to the SE down toward the Bahamas.  The sky was bright enough that we pretty much lost the second stage after it ignited, but the rumble got better as it went farther SE, and was a good, feel-it-in-your-chest, rumble.

We didn't get a good look at the Koreasat launch; our skies were too cloudy so that we never really got a good look at it and practically no rumble. We did hear the sonic boom of the booster returning to the launch site.

Perhaps an hour after the launch when NASASpaceflight was collecting various camera angles for a highlight reel, they shared this.  Their cameraman saw the moon happened to be in a place where he figured that he could capture the full Falcon 9 passing close by the moon in the distance

I don't know the closest that SpaceX has ever launched Falcon 9 missions from Pad 39A and SLC-40, but today's 4 hours 3 minutes seems like it has to be close to the record to me.  The SpaceX Statistics site lists a shorter time between two launches but doesn't exclude one of them could have been from California and the other from Florida.