SpaceX launched a batch of 23 Starlink satellites on its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral House Power Station. The mission brings the whole variety of Starlink satellite tv for pc to six,000 satellites in orbit, according to numbers printed Sunday by skilled orbital tracker and astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
Liftoff of the Starlink 6-58 mission from House Launch Advanced 40 occurred at 8:53 p.m. EDT (0053 UTC). This was SpaceX’s thirty fourth devoted Starlink launch of 2024.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, B1073 within the SpaceX fleet, made its fifteenth flight. Amongst its earlier missions, B1073 launched ispace’s HAKUTO-R lunar lander, SpaceX’s twenty seventh Industrial Resupply Providers (CRS-27) mission and the Bandwagon-1 rideshare flight.
A little bit greater than eight minutes after liftoff, B1073 landed on the SpaceX droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ This was the 69 booster touchdown for ASOG and the 307th booster touchdown for SpaceX thus far.
The mission got here amid a weekend of historic photo voltaic exercise that introduced auroras as far south as Florida. On Friday, the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) famous that a minimum of 5 coronal mass ejections had been noticed by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to that time.
As of Sunday morning, the SWPC mentioned {that a} “G4 or Higher Watch” remained in impact for Could 12, noting the probabilities of “extreme to excessive geomagnetic storming is feasible once more later in the present day.”
In a put up on his social media web site, X (previously referred to as Twitter), Elon Musk mentioned that SpaceX was intently monitoring the impression of the photo voltaic storms on the Starlink constellation.
Main geomagnetic photo voltaic storm occurring proper now. Largest in a very long time. Starlink satellites are beneath lots of strain, however holding up thus far. pic.twitter.com/TrEv5Acli2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2024
Starship flight 4
The launch exercise in Florida additionally comes as SpaceX is nearing the fourth built-in flight take a look at of its Starship rocket in southern Texas. The Tremendous Heavy Booster (Booster 11) is at the moment on the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM) and Ship 29 higher stage was staged for stacking on Sunday afternoon.
Musk mentioned in a separate put up that he anticipates IFT-4 is “in all probability three to 5 weeks” away, which might put the mission someday within the first half of June.
Whereas the corporate awaits approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the following Starship launch, the FAA additionally launched data noting that it’s going to conduct an environmental assessment concerning Starship launches at Launch Advanced 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy House Middle.
A pair of in-person scoping conferences are set for June 12 and 13 in Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island respectively to permit the general public to weigh in on the proposal. A digital assembly is about for June 17.
Whereas a Ultimate Environmental Evaluation for Starship was accomplished in September 2019, the FAA acknowledged that “SpaceX didn’t submit a car operator license utility for the Starship-Tremendous Heavy launch operations at LC-39A subsequent to the completion of the 2019 EA; subsequently, the FAA didn’t have a federal motion to undertake NASA’s EA/FONSI (discovering of no important impression).”
The company mentioned that SpaceX now proposes new launch infrastructure that was not a part of the 2019 EA and goals to launch as much as 44 launches per 12 months. SpaceX would additionally conduct Tremendous Heavy booster and Starship landings at both LC-39A or on a droneship for reusable missions or get rid of them within the ocean for expendable missions.
Tremendous Heavy booster for Flight 4 shifting to the pad at Starbase pic.twitter.com/jtDIvIXhOr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 11, 2024
