SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched 60 new Starlink satellites early Thursday morning.
The Falcon 9 booster took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, just hours after the company’s Starship prototype rocket exploded in Texas on Wednesday after completing a high-altitude test flight.
‘Space Hurricane’ first appeared on Earth’s upper ATMosphere
The Falcon 9 rocket booster returned to Earth and Hang the landing About eight-and-a-half minutes later, SpaceX’s drone ship “Cf course I still love” floats several hundred miles in the Atlantic Ocean.
“This will mark our 75th successful recovery of an orbital class rocket and the eighth recovery of this particular booster,” SpaceX Dragon Propulsion Engineer Yumei Zhou revealed during the live stream of the launch.
Starting Thursday It also marked the 109th flight overall for SpaceX’s flagship rocket, according to Space.com.
The deployment of 60 satellites took place one hour after launch time.
The highly anticipated launch was postponed three times this week, both due to automatic triggers and weak weather conditions, Nassasplight.com reported Thursday.
This is the company’s sixth mission this year and its 20th Starlink mission.
There are already more than 1,200 Starlink satellites in orbit – some of which are no longer operational – forming the largest constellation of artificial satellites, according to Fox 35 Orlando.
Earlier this year, SpaceX opened open access to satellites for members of the public in current or planned service areas using the pre-order reservation system.
The company plans to launch thousands upon thousands to build coverage, network capacity and speed.
Click here for the Fox News app
In a February 22 tweetThe constellation will provide active coverage for most of the Earth by 2021 and full global coverage by 2022, Musk said.
