Spacex launched one other 24 satellites for its Starlink web service from the West Coast Wednesday night.
Liftoff of the Starlink 17-45 mission from Area Launch Complicated 4E at Vandenberg Area Pressure Base in California occurred at 8:30 p.m. PDT (11:30 p.m. EDT / 0330 UTC).
The 24 Starlink V2 Mini satellites have been propelled on a south-southwesterly trajectory from Vandenberg atop Falcon 9 first stage B1081, making its twenty fifth flight. The booster landed on the drone ship ‘Of Course I Nonetheless Love You’ about 8.5 minutes after launch, with deployment of the satellites from the second stage following simply over an hour into flight.
California has turn out to be house to SpaceX’s workhorse launch pad in 2026 with the corporate’s choice to focus extra on Starship operations at Cape Canaveral. Wednesday’s mission is the seventh of eight launches SpaceX plans from Vandenberg in June, in contrast with six deliberate Florida launches this month.
Though it has two launch pads at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX is simply launching Falcon 9 rockets from Area Launch Complicated 40 at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station and is dedicating Launch Complicated 39A on the Kennedy Area Middle for Falcon Heavy missions so building of its first East Coast Starship facility at 39A can proceed with fewer interruptions. Additionally, SpaceX introduced in April it was repurposing considered one of its two East Coast Falcon 9 droneships, ‘Simply Learn the Directions’, for transporting Starship parts from Starbase to Florida.
If the present schedule holds, SpaceX can have launched 40 missions from Vandenberg versus 37 from Cape Canaveral within the first half of 2026.
The launch of the Starlink 17-28 mission on June 21 set a brand new turnaround for the pad at Area Launch Complicated 4E, occurring about 56 hours after the earlier flight. So quick was the turnaround that the booster for that earlier mission, NROL-179, which landed again at Vandenberg, was nonetheless seen on the touchdown zone.
