SpaceX plans to break several records Friday night by launching 23 satellites for the company’s Starlink internet service from Cape Canaveral. A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:22 p.m. EDT (0122 UTC).
It is the first time a Falcon 9 first stage launch vehicle has flown for the 20th time, and it has been just two days, 17 hours and 42 minutes since another Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Site 40 at Cape Canaveral has started. This breaks the previous record for the shortest time between launches by almost 22 hours.
Meteorologists from the 45th Weather Squadron predict near-perfect conditions for launch. They predict a less than five percent chance of a weather rule violation during the four-hour launch window, with launch winds the only concern.
This particular Falcon 9 rocket carries tail number 1062 on the SpaceX flight and entered service with a GPS satellite for the US Space Force in November 2020. It has flown astronauts into space twice on the commercial missions Inspiration 4 and Axiom 1. It has also flown 12 previous Starlink delivery missions.
Spaceflight Now will broadcast the launch live with commentary approximately an hour before launch.
The Falcon 9 will fly southeast and target an orbit at 43 degrees to the equator. After separating from the second stage approximately two and a half minutes into the flight, the first stage booster will descend to land on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Bahamas.
Two burns of the rocket’s second stage will launch the 23 second-generation Starlink satellites into orbit, with deployment occurring approximately one hour and five minutes after launch.
SpaceX has reported that it has 2.3 million subscribers in more than 70 countries for its Starlink internet service. The company has launched 6,189 satellites since 2019, according to statistics from Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who maintains a spaceflight database. According to McDowell’s latest update dated April 10, 2024, 5,787 of these satellites remain in orbit and 5,5721 appear to be operating normally.
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