Falcon 9 chalks up new launch pad turnaround report on Starlink launch – Spaceflight Now

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Sunday carrying 22 extra second-generation Starlink satellites into orbit, breaking a launch pad turnaround report.

The booster, making its fourth flight, lifted off from Area Launch Advanced 40 at 10:41 p.m. EDT (0241 UTC). It was three days 21 hours and 41 minutes for the reason that launch of Intelsat’s Galaxy 37 mission from pad 40. The earlier report of 4 days 3 hours and 11 minutes was set lower than two weeks in the past between Starlink missions 6-6 and 6-7. Sunday’s launch was pushed again from its authentic time of 9 p.m. EDT (0100 UTC) when the rocket went up proper at pad 40 at round 5 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC), which is later than typical.

After lifting off from Area Launch Advanced 40, the Falcon 9 headed south-east, concentrating on an orbit inclined at 43 levels to the equator. After separating from the second stage about two and a half minutes into flight, booster 1078 arced downrange for a touchdown on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which might be stationed within the Atlantic east of the Bahamas.

The booster had beforehand flown the Crew-6, SES O3b mPOWER and the Starlink 4-4 missions. Its final launch was 37 days in the past.

Two burns of the second stage place the satellites into the required round orbit. Separation of the 22 satellites occurred about one hour, 5 minutes after launch.

It was the ninth launch of the so-called V2 mini satellites that are bigger and have 4 occasions the bandwidth of the earlier fashions. The complete-sized V2 Starlink satellites are resulting from be launched by SpaceX’s fully-reusable Starship car, however the delayed debut of Starship led SpaceX to create a condensed model of the satellites so that they may very well be launched on Falcon 9.

Following the profitable conclusion of the Starlink 6-8 mission, based mostly on statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, SpaceX has now launched 4,903 Starlink satellites, and the variety of Starlink satellites at present in orbit is roughly 4,562.

In early Could, SpaceX introduced it had greater than 1.5 million subscribers to Starlink. The corporate’s web service is on the market in additional than 60 international locations.