SpaceX plans to launch 20 extra of its Starlink broadband satellites, together with 13 with direct-to-cell functionality, from California early Wednesday morning (Sept. 25).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to raise off from Vandenberg House Power Base, on California’s central coast, Wednesday at 3:01 a.m. EDT (0701 GMT; 9:01 p.m. on Sept. 24 California time).
You’ll be able to watch the motion dwell by way of SpaceX’s X account; protection will start about 5 minutes earlier than launch.
If all goes in keeping with plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will come again to Earth 8.5 minutes after liftoff, touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship “Of Course I Nonetheless Love You” within the Pacific Ocean.
Will probably be the tenth launch and touchdown for this explicit booster, in keeping with a SpaceX mission description.
The Falcon 9’s higher stage, in the meantime, will proceed powering its technique to low Earth orbit, deploying the 20 satellites there 60 minutes after liftoff. The newcomers will be part of the Starlink megaconstellation, which consists of greater than 6,300 active spacecraft.
Associated: Starlink satellite tv for pc prepare: Learn how to see and monitor it within the night time sky
The Starlink launch is a part of a usually busy week for SpaceX. Elon Musk’s firm goals to launch the Crew-9 astronaut mission to the Worldwide House Station (ISS) for NASA on Saturday (Sept. 28), sending it aloft by way of a Falcon 9 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral House Power Station.
Crew-9 is not your typical ISS astronaut mission. It is going to launch with two crewmembers as a substitute of the standard 4, as a result of it is going to take residence to Earth two individuals already residing on the ISS — NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who arrived in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Starliner suffered thruster points on its technique to the ISS, and NASA determined to carry the spacecraft residence uncrewed because of this. Williams and Wilmore will come residence with the 2 Crew-9 astronauts — NASA’s Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, of Russia’s area company Roscosmos — aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” in February 2025.
