![]() The reusable booster, designated B1069 in SpaceX’s inventory, made its eighth trip to space.įriday’s mission continued deployment of SpaceX’s older-generation Starlink V1.5 satellites. On Friday’s launch, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster re-entered the atmosphere for a propulsive landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” about 400 miles (640 kilometers) downrange approximately eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. The rest of the Starlink satellites were prototypes or failed platforms that have been retired from service and guided back into the atmosphere to burn up on re-entry. SpaceX currently has more than 4,200 functioning Starlink satellites in space, with nearly 3,700 operational spacecraft and more than 500 moving into their operational orbits, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, an expert tracker of spaceflight activity and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. SpaceX says each Starlink launch adds more than a terabit per second of capacity to the constellation. The 56 satellites on Friday’s mission, named Starlink 5-12, brought the total number of Starlink spacecraft SpaceX has launched to 4,698. The Starlink network provides high-speed, low-latency connectivity to customers around the world. SpaceX launched a batch of 47 Starlink internet payloads early Thursday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket headed southeast from Florida’s Space Coast to haul the 56 Starlink satellites into orbit on SpaceX’s last launch of the first half of 2023. SpaceX pushed back the launch time from earlier Friday morning due to stormy weather. EDT (1535 UTC) Friday, the company’s second mission in two days. SpaceX’s 44th launch of the year took off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 11:35 a.m. Another launch site is being developed at Boca Chica, Texas.A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Friday with another batch of Starlink internet satellites, wrapping up SpaceX’s action-packed first half of the year with the company’s 44th mission of 2023. They also operate from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, usually for polar launches. SpaceX operates from many pads, on the East Coast of the US they operate from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and historic LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. ![]() It was founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. Construction of such ships was commissioned by aerospace company SpaceX to allow for recovery of rocket first-stages at sea for high-velocity missions which do not carry enough fuel to return to the launch site after lofting spacecraft onto an orbital trajectory. The fourth ASDS barge, A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) is currently used to recover Falcon 9 and Heavy boosters in the Altantic Ocean.Īn autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) is an ocean-going vessel derived from a deck barge, outfitted with station-keeping engines and a large landing platform. B1077 has successfully landed on ASDS ASOG after its fifth flight.
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