SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, new Blue Origin rocket set for launches this week at Cape Canaveral

If weather permits and all systems are go, we'll see two important launches from Cape Canaveral over the next two nights. 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch at 1:11 a.m. on Wednesday. The maiden flight of Jeff Bezos' new Blue Origin rocket called the "New Glen" is also scheduled for 1 a.m. on Thursday.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 will carry a new generation of lunar landing robots built by private companies landing in a new era of exploration.

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"If we send more of these robotic explorers, hopefully followed by humans in the next five or six years, that's going to generate a lot of interest," said John Bisney of Seminole, who covered the space program for 30 years on network radio.

He'll be watching as robot landers try to touch down on different places on the moon. 

"It's going to land in regions more obscure than where Apollo landed," said Emily Carney, a space expert in St. Petersburg. 

She said robot landers and the experiments they carry could soon answer questions about where and how to build a moon base – even a moon colony.

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"For example, if there is lunar water you can generate fuel for it," said Carney.

This new chapter begins as the SpaceX rocket is set to deploy two robot landers, one of them Japanese, the other called "Blue Ghost," which was built just outside Austin, Texas, by a company called Firefly Aerospace. 

It's part of an experimental NASA program partnering with the private sector to reduce costs, but will it work? Others have failed.

"Only about half the ones sent to the Moon successfully make it. It's not a guaranteed thing," said Bisney. 

He saw his first launch at the Cape when he was 16 years old. He was part of a generation inspired by the race to the Moon with the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy's promise to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

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Will a generation with technology that puts Baby Boomers to shame take its technology from gaming and the workplace to exploration and inspiration toward space?

"In this new Space Economy that we’re in now, there’s enough room for all sorts of players," said Carney. "I think it does open the door for lots of cool things in the future."

It's a future with its next chapter set to blast off from the Cape.

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