Spacex sent another lot of Starlink satellites to orbit tonight (April 28), its second takeoff of the day.
A Falcon 9 rocket that transports 23 Starlink broadband satellites, including 13, with the direct capacity to the NASA Kennedy Space Center cell in Florida tonight at 10:34 pm EDT (0234 GMT on April 29).
It was the second Starlink group to fly today; A FALCON 9 LOFTED 27 of the Internet crafts of the Vandenberg space force in California today.
The launch of tonight marked the first takeoff for this first stage of Falcon 9s in particular. That is a rarity for Spacex, which is known for its reuse of rockets; One of the company’s Falcon 9 reinforcements has 27 flights to its credit.
Falcon 9 should fly again; He welcomed his landing tonight, going down on the Spacex drone ship “Droneship’s gravity deficit” in the Atlantic Ocean that summarizes eight minutes after takeoff.
The upper stage of the rocket continued to carry the 23 Starlink satellites to the orbit of the Low Earth (Leo), where they are scheduled to deploy 65 minutes after the launch.
Related: Starlink Satellite Train: How to see and track it in the night sky
The launch of tonight was already 50th Falcon 9 of the year. Thirty -three of those missions have been dedicated to building the Starlink network, the largest satellite constellation ever gathered.
The megaconstellation currently houses more than 7,200 spaces of operational ships, according to the astrophysicist and the Jonathan McDowell satellite tracker, and is growing all the time.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to affirm that the first launch of Spacex Starlink of the day occurred from the base of the Vandenberg space force in California. The original version incorrectly said that it was launched from the Cape Canaveral space force station in Florida.
