With two more launches planned for June, SpaceX is slated to launch five of its Falcon 9 rockets in about a month. Continuing this almost weekly launch rate would allow Elon Musk’s commercial space startup to easily set a new company record for most launches in a year.
The last series of missions began with his Historic success that sends NASA astronauts into orbit on May 27, followed by three Starlink Launches and plans to power a GPS satellite on June 30.
SpaceX’s eleventh launch in 2020 will be the third in that series of Starlink missions and is now scheduled for Friday (postponed from Tuesday to Thursday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the company’s twelfth launch of the year tentatively planned. for the following Tuesday.
SpaceX had its busiest year so far in 2018 with 21 launches and is now on track to eclipse that mark in 2020, perhaps reaching 38 launches for the full year if all of its plans work. The company hopes to continue packing its schedule with more takeoffs, with the goal of 70 missions in 2023, according to a draft submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this year.
Many of the launches will be Starlink missions, as SpaceX seeks to put tens of thousands of its small satellites into orbit this decade. The company has started Carrying out shared travel launches, making room for some commercial loads along with a batch of Starlink birds.
Thursday’s launch will be Starlink’s second shared ride, this time with two Earth observation microsatellites for Black Sky, a company that provides high-definition satellite imagery.
This will be Starlink’s third launch in June alone, bringing the size of the growing constellation to nearly 600 satellites and closer to the threshold of 800 flying routers than Musk has said he would allow a limited broadband service to start..
The June 26 launch is scheduled for 1:18 pm PT. SpaceX offers live streams of all of its releases, but if you want to watch it just go back here – we’ll add the stream once it’s available.