Approaching inclement weather on the Atlantic coast of Florida on Wednesday pushed back the scheduled launch of WGS-3, the Air Force’s third Wideband Global Satellite Communications spacecraft, by 24 hours, according to Air Force Space Command. The new launch window is now Thursday from 7:22 p.m. to 8:43 p.m. East Coast time, the command said in a release. WGS-3 will be carried into space aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket fired from Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla. It will reside in orbit over the eastern Atlantic.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
