The heavy launch vehicle Falcon 9 on Tuesday, May 4, successfully launched another batch of 60 mini-satellites into low-earth orbit, which are to replenish the orbital constellation of the global Internet coverage of the Starlink system. This was announced by the development company SpaceX in its Twitter…
“The withdrawal of Starlink satellites has been confirmed,” the company said. As part of the project, this is the 26th launch of a group of Internet satellites into orbit since May 2019.
At 15:01 US East Coast time (22:01 Moscow time), launch pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center (Florida) was launched. The broadcast was conducted on the Twitter page of SpaceX.
Approximately 1 hour 4 minutes after the launch of the rocket, the Starlink satellite group was launched into a given orbit. In addition, the first reusable stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, 8 minutes 39 seconds after launch, made a controlled vertical landing on the Of Course I Still Love You automatic floating platform, which was located in the Atlantic about 600 km from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome. This first reusable booster stage was used for launches for the ninth time.
Earlier, on April 29, a batch of 60 Starlink satellites were also launched. Taking into account the current satellites, the SpaceX orbital constellation will already consist of 1563 spacecraft. The company is currently the largest satellite operator in the world.
In the future, SpaceX intends to deploy an orbital constellation of 12,000 spacecraft of this type to create a full-scale network that will provide the inhabitants of the Earth with broadband Internet access anywhere in the world.