The day after it helped return three astronauts and a cosmonaut to Earth from the Worldwide House Station, SpaceX launch one other batch of Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral House Power Station.
The Starlink 10-8 mission provides one other batch of twenty-two V2 Mini satellites to SpaceX’s low Earth orbit constellation. This launch broke the document for essentially the most orbital launches from Florida’s House Coast in a calendar 12 months, which was beforehand 72 in 2023.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from House Launch Advanced 40 (SLC-40) occurred at 5:47 p.m. EDT (2147 UTC).
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for this mission, B1069 within the SpaceX fleet, was flying for a nineteenth time. It beforehand supported the launches of SpaceX’s twenty fourth Business Resupply Providers (CRS-24) mission to the Worldwide House Station, OneWeb Launch #15 and 14 earlier Starlink flights.
Slightly greater than eight minutes after liftoff, B1069 touched down on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Simply Learn the Directions.’ It was the ninety fifth touchdown on JRTI and the 359th booster touchdown so far.
Starlink 10-8 was additionally the corporate’s 69th devoted Starlink launch of 2024. In accordance with astronomer and skilled orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell, as of Oct. 25, there have been a complete of 6,494 Starlink satellites in LEO.
On Sept. 26, SpaceX introduced it reached greater than 4 million clients throughout the globe. Throughout a presentation on the Starbase launch and take a look at services in April, SpaceX founder Elon Musk famous that Starlink had about 2.7 million clients. It reported crossing the three million threshold a bit greater than a month later.
Starlink is connecting greater than 4M folks with high-speed web throughout 100+ international locations, territories and plenty of different markets.
Thanks to all of our clients world wide! 🛰️🌎❤️ → pic.twitter.com/sk7wucihxH
— Starlink (@Starlink) September 26, 2024