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 carry off from Vandenberg House Drive 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 possibly can watch the motion reside by way of SpaceX’s X account; protection will start about 5 minutes earlier than launch.
If all goes based on 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.
It is going to be the tenth launch and touchdown for this explicit booster, based on 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 lively spacecraft.
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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 Drive Station.
Crew-9 is not your typical ISS astronaut mission. It can launch with two crewmembers as a substitute of the same old 4, as a result of it’ll take dwelling 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 convey the spacecraft dwelling uncrewed because of this. Williams and Wilmore will come dwelling with the 2 Crew-9 astronauts — NASA’s Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, of Russia’s house company Roscosmos — aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” in February 2025.