SpaceX is trying to full its third Falcon 9 launch in lower than 48 hours with a mission from NASA’s Kennedy House Middle. As with its launch Wednesday night time, SpaceX goals to ship one other 23 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit.
Both serendipitously or deliberately, the Starlink 6-63 mission falls on the fifth anniversary of the primary devoted Starlink launch, Starlink v0.9 on Might 23, 2019. The launch instances of the 2 missions are additionally coincidentally very comparable. Thursday night time’s flight is concentrating on liftoff at 10:13 p.m. EDT (0213 UTC) and its five-year counterpart launched at 10:30 p.m. EDT (0230 UTC).
Spaceflight Now may have stay protection starting about an hour previous to liftoff.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting Thursday’s launch, tail quantity B1077 within the SpaceX fleet will likely be launching for a thirteenth time. It beforehand supported the launches of the Crew-5 mission to the Worldwide House Station, Northrop Grumman’s twentieth Cygnus flight to the ISS (NG-20) and 6 prior Starlink missions.
Somewhat greater than eight minutes after liftoff, the booster will land on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Simply Learn the Directions,’ out within the Atlantic Ocean. This would be the 82nd booster touchdown for JRTI and the 312th booster touchdown to this point for SpaceX.
Starlink by the numbers
Earlier this week, SpaceX marked a milestone of three million prospects around the globe in addition to having energetic service throughout 99 nations, markets or territories.
In accordance with Starlink buyer progress knowledge tracked by Payload House, SpaceX added roughly 700,000 prospects because the fourth quarter of 2023.
Starlink simply hit 3M prospects, with progress accelerating within the first 5 months of the yr (+700K) pic.twitter.com/6O9lAwwZey
— Jack Kuhr 👨🚀 (@JackKuhr) May 20, 2024
SpaceX has launched fairly a number of Starlink missions to succeed in these numbers. Within the 5 years since devoted Starlink flights started, there have been 164 such missions with greater than half occurring because the begin of 2023.
- 2019 – 2
- 2020 – 14
- 2021 – 17*
- 2022 – 34
- 2023 – 63 (43 V2 Mini launches)
- 2024 – 37*
The 2 asterisks characterize a pair of missions that weren’t purely Starlink flights. Starlink 4-3, which launched on Dec. 2, 2021, included a pair of BlackSky Gen-2 satellites. Equally, Starlink 7-16, which launched on March 18, 2024, is believed to have included a pair of Starshield satellites, although SpaceX has not confirmed this.
Final yr, SpaceX additionally started launching its Starlink V2 Mini satellites as it really works in direction of having a totally purposeful Starship rocket. Thus far, there have been 100 launches of the Starlink V2 Mini number of satellites.
