SpaceX launched a milestone mission on Sunday night time (April 27).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 of the corporate’s Starlink broadband satellites — together with 13 with direct-to-cell functionality — lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral House Drive Station on Sunday at 10:09 p.m. EDT (0209 GMT on Monday, April 28).
It was the 250th time SpaceX had despatched a batch of Starlink craft skyward, the corporate noted via X shortly after launch.
About eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s first stage got here again to Earth for a vertical landing as deliberate. It landed on the SpaceX drone ship “Simply Learn the Directions,” which was stationed within the Atlantic Ocean.
It was the twentieth liftoff and touchdown for this explicit booster, in accordance with a SpaceX mission description. 13 of these flights have been Starlink missions.
The rocket’s higher stage did its job, too. It deployed the 23 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) about an hour after launch, SpaceX introduced in an update on X.
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Sunday night time’s launch was the forty eighth Falcon 9 flight of 2025, and the thirty first devoted to constructing out the Starlink megaconstellation. That community at present consists of greater than 7,200 operational satellites and is rising on a regular basis.
The primary devoted Starlink launch occurred in Might 2019 (although SpaceX launched two prototype broadband craft greater than a yr earlier, in February 2018). Over the previous six years, SpaceX has lofted practically 8,400 Starlink satellites on these 250 launches, according to astrophysicist and satellite tv for pc tracker Jonathan McDowell.
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