Another 60 Internet satellites exploded from Starlink into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday morning from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the 25th mission to launch a space vehicle for the SpaceX broadband network.
Falcon 9 takes off from Platform 40 at 4:28:24 AM EST (0828: 24 GMT) on Wednesday powered by nine Merlin 1D kerosene main engines. The rocket engine aimed the missile northeast from Cape Canaveral with a thrust of 1.7 million pounds.
After passing through the high-altitude cloud layer, the first stage launcher dropped its boost and started the second-stage engine to accelerate sixty Starlink satellites into orbit.
Meanwhile, the 15-storey booster landed onto a targeted landing aboard the drone ship SpaceX that was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles (630 kilometers) northeast of Florida’s space coast. The landing strip will return to Port Canaveral for SpaceX to check the boosters, regenerate them, and reuse them for another flight.
The booster used in Wednesday’s mission – designated B1060 in SpaceX’s fleet – has made its sixth flight into space and back since its debut last June. This is the 78th successful recall of the Enhanced Falcon since 2015.
The shell-like payload covering the Starlink satellites is expected to drop during the first few minutes of the parachute flight to the Atlantic, as rescue ships plan to restore part of the voyage to bring it back to Florida for repair.
The second-stage engine put the Starlink satellite stack into orbit waiting about nine minutes after take-off. The missile crossed the Atlantic Ocean, flew over Europe and the Middle East, and then restarted its engine to burn for a second over the Indian Ocean.
The rocket deployed 60 flat-plate broadband satellites more than an hour after the mission at 5:13 a.m. EDT (0913 GMT), covering this year’s launch of SpaceX’s 9 Falcon 9, and its fourth since early March.
This is the 23rd Falcon 9 launch intended to deploy Starlink satellites. The other two missions carried Starlink’s payload as secondary passengers.
SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon 9 is slated to launch in early April to send another wave of Starlink satellites into orbit, with mission speed continuing.
Launch on Wednesday was Flight 120 of the Falcon missile, 15 years after the first launch of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket on March 24, 2006. Falcon 1 failed seconds after take-off, due to a fuel leak and engine fire that caused the missile to fall near the launch pad. an island on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
SpaceX has carried out 87 successive missions with the heavy Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy missiles since the pre-launch blast destroyed the missile on Israel’s Israeli communications satellite in September 2016. Not to mention this incident, SpaceX has amassed 96 consecutive series. launching Falcon Since the last flight failure at the end of the mission.
With SpaceX’s launch on Wednesday, it sent 1,385 Starlink satellites into orbit in a series of Falcon 9 missions.Some of these satellites were prototypes, returned to the atmosphere and caught fire. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a prestigious extraterrestrial activity tracker, said SpaceX still had about 1,260 Starlink satellites in orbit before Sunday’s mission.
The Starlink network could eventually number more than 10,000 satellites, but the first stage of Starlinks will contain 1,584 satellites orbiting 341 miles (550 km) above Earth with a path tilted 53 degrees to the equator. The 60 new satellites launched on Wednesday will deploy their solar panels and activate krypton-fueled ion thrust engines to raise their altitude before entering service on the Starlink network.
SpaceX has received approval from the Federal Communications Commission for approximately 12,000 Starlink satellites at various altitudes and miles, all within a few hundred miles of the planet. The low altitude of the satellite makes it possible to provide high-speed and low-latency connectivity to customers, and helps ensure the spacecraft naturally returns to the atmosphere sooner than if it had flown far from Earth.
Starlink already offers temporary trial services in high latitudes, such as the northern United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Further launching of Starlink this year will allow for expansion of the coverage area.
SpaceX announced earlier this month that Starlink’s pilot service would soon begin reaching customers in Germany, New Zealand, and in other parts of the UK, including Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England. SpaceX said that the region could receive trial service in the “coming weeks.”
SpaceX takes pre-orders from potential Starlink customers, who can pay $ 99 to queue for Starlink’s service when it becomes available in their area. For people in the southern US and other low-latitude regions, it will come in late 2021, SpaceX said.
Once confirmed, customers will pay $ 499 for the Starlink antenna and modem, plus $ 50 for shipping and handling, SpaceX said. The subscription will run for $ 99 a month.
Sixty Starlink internet satellites have just been deployed from Falcon 9, bringing the number of Starlink spacecraft launched by SpaceX to 1,385.
The satellite will mount solar panels and use ion boosters to reach an altitude of 341 miles (550 kilometers).https://t.co/XrCIW7t6vm pic.twitter.com/jlcdMUC9LP
– Spaceflight Now (SpaceflightNow) March 24, 2021
The Starlink satellites were built by SpaceX in Redmond, Washington, and each spacecraft weighed about a quarter tonne at take-off. The fully loaded stack of 60 Starlink satellites weighs about 34,400 lbs or 15.6 metric tons.
SpaceX has equipped a newer version of the satellite with masks to dim the brightness to people on Earth. Engineers tweaked the Starlink satellites last year after astronomers raised concerns that the spacecraft might destroy some telescopic observations.
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