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On Wednesday (22), SpaceX held another Starlink satellite launch at 16:30 (Brasilia time), after the previous one happened in March. The Falcon 9 rocket took off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and increased the fleet number to 422 satellites in low Earth orbit.
After separating the stages, SpaceX recovered the first stage of the Falcon 9 on the drone “Of course I still love you”, which was waiting to land in the Atlantic Ocean. This is always a moment awaited by the team, as SpaceX has failed to recapture the first stage in some previous releases.
This was the fourth successful recovery of momentum currently used in Starlink launches, and the landing was accompanied by applause from the team during SpaceX’s live broadcast. At 4:46 pm, the satellites successfully deployed into Earth orbit.
Today’s flight marks the seventh successful launch of the Starlink project, placing the satellite batches into orbit as planned. Several other Starlink releases are planned for 2020, but the “constellation” is expected to decrease a bit soon. It is that SpaceX plans to disable two of them, the first two prototypes that were launched.
Elon Musk’s company plans to begin offering high-speed, low-latency broadband connectivity in some regions of the United States and Canada later this year. With this launch, the set of satellites, while still initial, may be able to provide an inaugural offering, as Musk had reported that 400 to 800 satellites were needed for this. The final constellation predicts a total of 30,000 units, but SpaceX can obtain approval to increase that number to a total of 42,000 satellites.
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