The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket intercepted 60 more Starlink Internet relay satellites from the Kennedy Space Center along with another set awaiting Wednesday’s launch from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Sunday.
With Sunday’s flight, SpaceX has now launched 835 Starlinks into a rapidly expanding global network, which will eventually deliver thousands of commercial broadband beacons to high-speed Internet anywhere on Earth. To reach this goal, the company plans to launch at least 120 new Starlinks every month.
William Hardwood / CBS News
The latest Starlink mission, SpaceX’s 14th, took place at 8:26 a.m. when nine first-stage engines of the Falcon 9, a thin rocket with a paddle 39 on a 1.7 million-pound head at the Kennedy Space Center, were ignited by a flare-up. .
Making its sixth flight, the first stage took the rocket out of the lower atmosphere and then it fell down and headed towards the Sh Fasher droneship landing. Touchdown marks SpaceX’s 62nd successful booster recovery since December 2015, its 42nd at sea.
Less than a minute after leaving the stage, two pieces of the rocket’s nasal cone ferring, both veterans of the previous two missions, fell to land parachutes to catch the nets in the waiting recovery vessels. Both were successfully recovered, although one seemed to have broken out of his net, presumably. Hit the deck of his ship.
Meanwhile, in the second phase, pressed forward into orbit and after two shots from its vacuum-rated Merlin engine, all 60 Starlinks were released to fly on their own about an hour after the liftoff.
SpaceX
SpaceX’s second Falcon 9 flight was marked late Sunday, October 2, when the final-second void of space hampered the launch of the Space Force Global Positioning System Navigation Satellite. It stays on flight hold while the company engineers assess the point specified by the engine turbompump machinery.
How the SpaceX used the engines on Sunday and the engines used during the Starlink flight on October 18, GPS. No details were given about what could be different than the ones used for the mission.
Similarly, there is no word yet from SpaceX or NASA as to whether the engine issue poses a threat to the planned launch of four astronauts on the International Space Station above the Falcon 9 next month.
Sunday’s launch was the 18th Falcon 9 flight so far this year, the 95th since the rocket’s launch in 2010, and the 98th three-core launch of the triple-core Falcon Heavy. The Falcon 9 has suffered two catastrophic failures, one in flight and one during pre-launch testing.
.
