James Dean

FLORIDA TODAY

SpaceX may fire up a Falcon 9 rocket's engines on Monday in a test preparing for a planned 5:40 p.m. Thursday blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The launch of a Thai communications satellite — and an attempted rocket landing to follow — should look much like SpaceX's May 6 launch of a Japanese communications satellite, but with the action unfolding in daylight instead of darkness.

The roughly 7,000-pound Thaicom 8 satellite built by Orbital ATK will beam TV channels and Internet service to Thailand, India and parts of Africa from a position 22,300 miles above the equator.

After separating from the rocket's upper stage, the Falcon 9 booster will dive toward an unpiloted SpaceX "drone ship" floating offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, hoping to make it three consecutive missions with successful booster landings at sea.

The Falcon 9 flies faster on missions launching communications satellites to high orbits, increasing 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.

SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage booster suffered 'max' damage on landing

OSIRIS-REx unpacked at KSC

A spacecraft that will make NASA's first to attempt to collect an asteroid sample for return to Earth has arrived at Kennedy Space Center to prepare for a September launch from Cape Canaveral.

An Air Force C-17 aircraft carrying the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility around 7 p.m. Friday, after taking off from Buckley Air Force Base near Denver.

The $800 million mission is targeting a Sept. 8 liftoff on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. It must launch by Oct. 12 or else be delayed for a year.

Short for "Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer," OSIRIS-REx is expected by August 2018 to reach the asteroid Bennu, a space rock measuring about 1,900 feet in diameter that poses a potential threat to Earth late in the next century.

The spacecraft in 2019 will use a robotic arm to try to pluck a two-ounce sample from Bennu for return to Earth by 2023.

"Scientists suspect Bennu may hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of the water and organic molecules that may have made their way to Earth," NASA said in a press release.

After its arrival Friday, teams transported the spacecraft to KSC's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where it was unpacked from its shipping crate on Saturday to begin launch processing activities.

Space Congress to convene in Cape Canaveral

BEAM to be inflated on ISS

A prototype habitat is scheduled to take shape early Thursday outside the International Space Station when astronauts and engineers on the ground inflate it with air.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, was delivered to the station 250 miles above Earth by a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched April 8 from Cape Canaveral, and later attached to a docking port by a robotic arm.

The module will expand to about 13 feet in length and nearly 11 feet in diameter. Astronauts will help equip it with sensors that over two years will measure radiation, temperatures and debris strikes.

Astronauts are only expected to go inside the module infrequently, but it could serve as a precursor to a much larger module that could be attached to the ISS or flown independently, and to habitats that could end up on the moon or Mars.

ULA plans June launches of Delta Heavy, Atlas V rockets

X-37B mission starts second year

The latest mission by the Air Force's secretive X-37B mini-shuttle has now been in orbit more than a year.

The fourth flight of the unmanned space plane also called the Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, blasted off from Cape Canaveral on May 20th of last year on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

The mission duration is nothing remarkable — the previous flight lasted 674 days and the one before that 469 days.

What could be different this time is where the mission lands, whenever it is ready to do so.

The Air Force has consolidated the program's operations from California to Kennedy Space Center, where it took over two former shuttle hangars that NASA no longer needed. The program operated by Boeing aimed to streamline operations with with an eye to both launching and landing in Florida.

The first three X-37B missions made safe, unpiloted touchdowns at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Secret space plane catches ride into orbit

Orion service module assembly begins

European officials last week announced they have begun assembling a critical piece of the Orion spacecraft that NASA hopes to launch from Kennedy Space Center by late 2018.

Airbus Defense and Space said it is integrating more than 20,000 components to put together Orion's service module, which will provide propulsion, power, air and water for the Orion crew capsule being built by Lockheed Martin at KSC.

“With the Orion service module, we are part of an historic space mission,” said François Auque, head of Space Systems at Airbus. “We will make sure this mission is a success, working hand in hand with our customers ESA and NASA and our industrial partner Lockheed Martin Space Systems.”

Exploration Mission-1, which is targeting liftoff in November 2018 on NASA's new Space Launch System rocket, aims to send an unmanned Orion on a shakedown cruise around the moon. The first crew could launch in Orion in 2023, starting a series of exploration missions in the moon's vicinity before possibly pushing on to Mars in the 2030s.

Mars opposition

Now is a great time to look for Mars in the night sky.

The Red Planet today, reaches "opposition," when its orbit takes it directly opposite Earth from the sun.

"We’re the closest that we get to each other," said NASA's Michelle Thaller, an astronomer at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center. "So that means the closer we are to Mars, the larger it is in the sky, the brighter it is."

Look above and to the right of the rising full moon if the night is clear enough, and you should see Mars looking like a bright red star.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope earlier this month took advantage of Mars' relative proximity — when it was 50 million miles away — to take a new portrait of the planet showing deserts, bedrock, icy polar caps and even light clouds.

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 orjdean@floridatoday.com.And follow on Twitter at@flatoday_jdeanand on Facebook atfacebook.com/jamesdeanspace.