Go big or go home. This evening, Elon Musk's SpaceX will attempt one of its more ambitious rocket launches yet: Using a Falcon 9 rocket to launch a 13,500-pound telecommunications satellite into an orbit roughly 22,000 miles above the planet's surface.
The mission will be SpaceX's sixth rocket launch of 2017, and marks the company's first launch for British telecom provider Inmarsat. The Inmarsat-5 satellite being lofted up by the rocket is being placed in a geostationary transfer orbit; this will ultimately loft it to a final geostationary orbit above the Earth's equator, at which point it will match the planet's speed, enabling the bird to effectively remain in place in reference to the surface.
Unlike many of the private space launch company's previous blast-offs, however, the company will not attempt to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. Due to the size of the payload and the altitude it's headed towards, the rocket needs every erg of energy it can muster—which means it wouldn't have enough fuel left to return to Earth for a controlled landing.
The rocket will lift off from launch pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center tonight sometime between 7:20pm Florida time, when the launch window opens, and 8:09 pm, when it shuts again. (There's another launch window tomorrow should something go awry.) SpaceX will be livestreaming the launch as well, using the YouTube window below. So if tonight's Seinfeld rerun is a particularly stale episode, you might want to chuck this on instead.