A Falcon 9 rocket is set to thunder off the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early Tuesday morning, hauling roughly 6,500 pounds of supplies and science gear to the International Space Station — and sending a now-familiar sonic boom rolling across Central Florida as its booster comes back down. Liftoff from Launch Complex 40 is targeted for 6:33 a.m. Tuesday, October 13, kicking off SpaceX's 35th resupply run for NASA under its Commercial Resupply Services contract.
According to the Miami Herald, the mission will send a Cargo Dragon spacecraft toward the orbiting outpost loaded with supplies and research for the astronauts living there. The booster assigned to the flight, designated B1096, is flying for the eighth time, having previously launched payloads including IMAP, CRS-34, and GPS III-9, according to SpaceX. The Dragon capsule itself, C211, is making its fourth orbital flight, having already supported the CRS-26, CRS-29, and CRS-33 resupply missions, per the same SpaceX mission details.
Booster Set to Touch Down Near the Pad
After separating from the second stage, the Falcon 9's first-stage booster will aim for a return landing at Landing Zone 40, just next to the launch pad it lifted off from. The report notes Central Florida should expect sonic booms as the booster makes its way back down. That facility was only activated by SpaceX in February 2026 during the Crew-12 launch, giving the company a pad-adjacent return site meant to speed up recovery by cutting down on transit time back to processing hangars, according to BASENOR.
Those return-to-launch-site booms have become a recurring disturbance well beyond the Space Coast. As Hoodline previously reported on a similar sonic boom, the shockwaves routinely rattle windows across nine Central Florida counties, including Brevard, Volusia, Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Polk. How sharply residents feel it on launch morning can depend on cloud cover and temperature inversion layers overhead.
A Tight Window, With a Backup Day Ready
If Tuesday's attempt slips because of weather or a technical issue, SpaceX has a backup launch window set for Wednesday, October 14, at 6:08 a.m. EDT, per the company's mission page. Assuming Tuesday's countdown holds, Dragon will spend roughly 52 hours in autonomous transit before docking at the space-facing Harmony zenith port on Thursday, October 15, according to Starlust. The Miami Herald reports docking is scheduled for approximately 11 a.m. that day, with Dragon remaining attached to the station into mid-November.
That docking port only opened up after NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 spacecraft and its crew splashed down off the California coast on October 8, wrapping a stay aboard the station of nearly eight months, per the Miami Herald's report. Crew-13 had already launched from Cape Canaveral on October 1 and is now aboard the station awaiting the CRS-35 delivery, the outlet notes.
Powering the Station Through Its Final Years
Tucked into the cargo manifest is the final pair of International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, known as iROSA, meant to boost the station's power channels as it heads toward a planned deorbit in 2030, according to Starlust's mission preview. The original panels have degraded over two decades in orbit, making this delivery a capstone piece of the station's long-running power upgrade effort.
Also riding along is an experiment designed by students at Florida Tech, built through the national Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. The project examines how microgravity affects the radiation-shielding properties of hydrogels, research aimed at helping protect future astronauts on long-duration trips to Mars, according to Florida Institute of Technology.
A Busier Launch Schedule, by Design and by Necessity
The timing of CRS-35 isn't purely routine. Global resupply schedules shifted after a November 2025 Soyuz launch damaged a pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, pushing several commercial cargo flights earlier into 2026 as international partners rebalanced their manifests, according to a Wikipedia summary of the mission. That reshuffling has layered onto an already fast-growing launch cadence out of Florida.
Federal agencies projected in August 2026 that U.S. spaceports could eventually support up to 1,000 launches a year by 2030, driven largely by the pace of activity at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base, per Air & Space Forces Magazine. For Central Florida residents, that trend likely means the Tuesday-morning window-rattling is far from a one-off event.
