SpaceX will try again Wednesday to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, following a last-minute scrub Monday due to poor weather.
The heavy lift rocket will use about 5.1 million pounds of thrust to propel ViaSat-3 F3 to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, the third and final satellite in the ViaSat-3 series.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A is scheduled for 10:13 a.m. EDT (1413 UTC), at the opening of an 85-minute window. Deployment of the six metric ton spacecraft is anticipated nearly five hours after taking off from Florida’s Space Coast.
“As the spacecraft enters service, I think what you’re going to see is more and more of our airline customers providing free use of airborne WiFi. And with recent updates to the networks and everything, a number of those have enabled free streaming,” said Dave Abrahamian, Viasat’s vice president of Satellite Systems.
“You can stream Netflix at 4K in the sky. When we started many, many years ago with ViaSat-1, you couldn’t do that. Just being able to get basic SMS or email service in the air was a big deal, but now we’re up to streaming in 4K. So I think [the public will] appreciate the results of the program without necessarily understanding how we got there, what enables it.”
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the mission beginning about two hours prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather during the window, a marked improvement from the 55 percent forecast Monday. The primary concern for meteorologists this time around is the chance of thick clouds.
The three boosters SpaceX will fly on the mission are a combination of old, new, and brand new. The two side boosters, tail numbers 1072 and 1075, will be flying for a second and 22nd time respectively.
Since SpaceX has retired one of its original landing zones at Cape Canaveral, the twin side boosters will return to sites about ten miles apart. On landing at Landing Zone 2 (LZ-2) and the other at Landing Zone 40 (LZ-40), adjacent to Space Launch Complex 40.
SpaceX will not attempt to recover the core stage, brand new booster B1098, and it will be discarded in the Atlantic Ocean.
Flying Falcon Heavy
The launch of the ViaSat-3 F3 mission marks the 12th flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut in 2018. Two of those missions carried ViaSat-3 satellites onboard.
Abrahamian noted that the time for on-orbit commissioning will be shorter than that of the Viasat-3 F2 satellite which flew on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. He said orbit raising to the operating position at the 158.55 degrees East position along the equator will take about two months.
“Falcon Heavy is a more powerful vehicle than Atlas 5 was, so they can put us in a more favorable transfer orbit for the electric propulsion,” Abrahamian said. “So they’re going to drop us off in an orbit, hopefully, that is just below [geostationary Earth orbit] apogee-wise, about 23,000 kilometers perigee-wise, and only about three degrees of inclination. So, it’s a very [electric propulsion]-friendly orbit.”
He said it will take at least a couple of months after that to go through the various deployment stages on the satellite and conduct checkouts before the satellite manufacturer, Boeing, hands the vehicle over to Viasat for operational use.
ViaSat-3 F2, which flew on Atlas 5 in November 2025, is still completing its on orbit checkout and is slated to begin operational service in the near future. We asked Abrahamian if he saw any challenges or key differences between the work to vertically integrate Viasat’s payload versus horizontal integration, since his company has done both.
“If you had asked me that before F2 happened and before all the weather challenges with stacking F2 I would have said no. But now, having been through that and doing this, there’s certainly much more flexibility in not having as many constraints on you when you’re doing horizontal integration,” Abrahamian said. “It presents its own set of challenges when you have to roll out to the pad, align very carefully, to pad infrastructure and then go vertical. So that’s a challenge that Atlas doesn’t have. Each system seems to work for each provider.”
Adding capacity
This third and final satellite in the ViaSat-3 constellation will target its area of coverage over the Asia-Pacific region and is intended to add more than 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) of capacity to the overall Viasat network.
“We have a number of airline customers in the APAC region that are really anxious to get this capacity online so they can start serving their customers better,” Abrahamian said. “Two of the hallmarks of the ViaSat-3 constellation are a huge amount of just absolute capacity, but also the flexibility to put it wherever you need it, whenever you need it.
“So it’s not like a traditional satellite, like a ViaSat-1, or Ka sat, or most of the Inmarsat fleet, where you’ve got a single feed per beam, beam locations are fixed, spectrum allocations are fixed and you might overload one beam over here and another beam doesn’t have anybody in it and you can’t move that capacity.”
Abrahamian said the advantage of these newer satellites is their overall flexibility.
“ViaSat-3 because we’re using a phased array technology and our antennas onboard, we can form a beam wherever we need it,” he said. “We can allocate spectrum to it as we need it. We can put multiple beams in an area as needed. We can put multiple beams in an area as needed. So we really don’t have the issue of trapped capacity here. So it’s a matter of following the demand wherever it is, within that spacecraft’s field of view.”
