SpaceX scrubbed the Bandwagon-5 Falcon 9 launch attempt on Monday because weather in the booster recovery zone was unacceptable, and the company now plans to try again the following day from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The mission will lift from Space Launch Complex 40 on a southeasterly trajectory and the launch window opens at 6:30 a.m. EDT 1030 UTC. Spaceflight Now said it will carry live coverage beginning about an hour before liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron advised there is a high probability that conditions will be acceptable for the new window, noting a cold front has shifted slightly south and should reduce high winds at liftoff. The forecast lowered the risk of violations from the Cumulus Cloud Rule, but it still described a moderate risk that weather at the first stage recovery site might be marginal. Those meteorological assessments came from launch weather officers at Patrick Space Force Base.
SpaceX will fly the mission on a Falcon 9 first stage booster numbered B1085, which will make its 19th flight. RocketLaunch.org reported the booster was last used 69 days ago and listed earlier missions that included NASA's Crew-9 and multiple Starlink batches. About nine minutes after liftoff the booster will aim to land on the droneship A Shortfall Of Gravitas. SpaceX noted that a successful recovery would mark the vessel's 167th landing and the 672nd Falcon booster landing overall.
Payloads And Reentry Experiments
The Bandwagon-5 rideshare carries 32 payloads, with 20 of the remaining 31 satellites manifested by Exolaunch, the mission management company. Exolaunch's list includes four radio frequency monitoring satellites for HawkEye 360, four communications satellites for Iceye, and six navigation satellites for Xona Space Systems. Portal Space Systems' Starburst-1 technology demonstrator is also onboard, a 260 kilogram spacecraft designed to perform orbital manoeuvres and host up to a 50 kilogram customer payload, with customer flights aimed to begin in 2027 according to the company.
The flight hosts two separate reentry capsule demonstrations. SpaceX's Project Starfall returned to flight on this mission with a cylindrical capsule roughly 0.75 meters tall, 3.1 meters in diameter, and about 2,100 kilograms in mass, the FAA wrote in an environmental assessment. The FAA also said a single Starfall capsule can support up to 1,000 kilograms of payload. SpaceX has described Starfall as a microgravity lab for research and in-orbit manufacturing and said the design is intended to be compatible with future Starship missions.
Varda Space Industries is flying its W Series 7 reentry capsule on the same launch. Varda described W-7 as about one third the size of Starfall and noted this is its ninth capsule launched. The W-7 carries an experiment on the cancer drug Protac to test whether microgravity changes crystallization and improves solubility, a result that could affect drug properties and practicality, Varda said on its website.
