TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – SpaceX successfully launches a new group of internet satellites Starlink on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. This launch is the 10th in as many weeks.
This time, Rocket Falcon 9 launched 48 Starlink satellites into orbit from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida at 08:45 EST (1545 GMT). The first stage of the rocket then returns to Earth for a smooth landing in the ocean with the SpaceX A Shortfall of Gravitas drone.
“Time to let America’s broom fly and hear the voice of freedom,” said the launch director SpaceX just before launch. The use of the term ‘American broom’ is a response to the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin.
Earlier, Dmitry said, “Let them fly with something else, broom them,” last week after Russia halted sales of its rocket engines to the US following economic sanctions following the country’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has leaned on Rogozin’s comments, calling the Falcon 9 a reliable “American broom” in a Twitter post last week.
SpaceX has also provided Starlink terminals to Ukraine to help restore communications and internet services across the country and is focusing on cybersecurity to prevent tampering with the terminals.
“Another 48 Starlinks have just reached orbit,” Musk wrote on Twitter Wednesday after the successful launch.
Starlink is a giant constellation of broadband satellites that SpaceX assembled in low-Earth orbit. The company has launched more than 2,000 Starlinks since 2019, and many more will be rising in the relatively near future.
SpaceX has permission to launch 12,000 Starlink satellites and has applied for approval of up to another 30,000 satellites. Wednesday’s Starlink mission, called Starlink 4-10, marked the 41st flight for the megaconstellation.
Last month, SpaceX lost nearly its entire Starlink satellite pool to a solar storm that caused dozens of Starlinks to fall from space and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere days after launch. SpaceX has since increased the altitude of its initial deployment to avoid a repeat of a similar incident.
Wednesday’s launch marked the fourth flight and landing for the Falcon 9’s first stage, SpaceX said. The booster also launched the Arabsat-6A mission in April 2019, Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) flights for the US military in June 2019 and the Italian Earth observation satellite COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2 in January.
The first two missions on the list-Arabsat-6A and STP-2-were flown by a large Falcon Heavy SpaceX rocket, consisting of three Falcon 9 cores tied into one, which was in the middle above it with a second stage. The COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2 is flown by the Falcon 9.
Read:
SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Internet Service is Active in Ukraine, What is Starlink?
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