LC-39A and SLC-40 Operating in Parallel

Marcia Smith, SpacePolicyOnline.com, with an interesting tidbit from the pre-launch press conference on LC-39A and SLC-40 operations:

Work continues on repairing the launch pad and Koenigsmann said launches will resume in late summer or early fall. The company will use both LC-39A and SLC-40 as it tries to accelerate its launch rate and work off the backlog caused by the explosion and resulting investigation.

To this point, we’ve understood that once SLC-40 is repaired, 39A would be taken offline for 60 days to add hardware needed to support Falcon Heavy—additional hold-down clamps and tail service masts—and crewed flights—the crew access arm—from that pad.

This info from Koenigsmann means one of two things: they can complete the work while continuing to fly missions from 39A, or they plan to push the work to the end of the year to give themselves some time with two east coast pads operational.

The first situation seems unlikely to me, and the second squares up with something I’ve been hearing lately: that Falcon Heavy is slipping into 2018. Given the amount of hardware we’ve seen for Falcon Heavy, maybe this slip, if true, is due to SpaceX giving their Falcon 9 manifest priority.