A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the West Coast with one other batch of twenty-two Starlink satellites at 8:11 p.m. PST Thursday (11:11 p.m. EST / 0411 UTC).
The Starlink 7-15 mission roared away from House Launch Advanced 4E at Vandenberg House Pressure Base in California on the primary launch alternative of the day, heading on a south-easterly trajectory, concentrating on a 184×178 mile (296×287 km) orbit, inclined at 53 levels to the equator.
The primary stage booster, tail quantity 1061 was making its nineteenth flight, which ties the document beforehand set by booster 1058 earlier than it was misplaced throughout restoration operations following a profitable launch and touchdown.
Booster 1061 joined the fleet on the East Coast launching the Crew 1 and a couple of missions to the Worldwide House Station. It went on to fly the SXM-8, Cargo Dragon CRS-23, IXPE, Transporter-4 and Transporter-5 missions earlier than transferring to the West Coast the place it launched the Globalstar FM15, ISI EROS C-3 and Korea 425 missions. It additionally flew on eight earlier Starlink supply missions.
After finishing its burn, the primary stage touched down on the drone ship ‘Of Course I nonetheless Love You’ stationed about 400 miles downrange (644km) within the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.
If all goes in keeping with plan, deployment of the 22 V2 Mini Starlink satellites will happen simply over an hour after launch.
SpaceX says it has greater than two million subscribers to its Starlink web service in additional than 60 nations. Since 2019 it has launched 5,850 Starlinks in keeping with statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer on the Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics, who maintains an area flight database. Of these satellites 5,459 stay in orbit and 5,422 seem like operational.
