SpaceX will launch 56 extra of its Starlink web satellites to orbit early Thursday morning (Jan. 26), and you’ll watch the liftoff stay.
A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 56 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station on Thursday at 4:22 a.m. EST (0922 GMT).Â
Watch it stay right here at Area.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or straight via the company (opens in new tab). Protection will begin about 5 minutes earlier than liftoff.
Associated: 10 weird things about SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites
If all goes based on plan, the primary stage of the two-stage Falcon 9 will come again to Earth about eight minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff. The booster will contact down vertically on the SpaceX droneship Simply Learn the Directions, which might be stationed within the Atlantic Ocean, a number of hundred miles off the Florida coast.
It will likely be the ninth launch and touchdown for this explicit booster. Amongst its earlier flights are the Crew-3 and Crew-4 astronaut missions to the International Space Station for NASA, two robotic cargo flights to the orbiting lab and one Starlink mission, SpaceX wrote in a mission description (opens in new tab).
The rocket’s higher stage will proceed hauling the 56 satellites to low Earth orbit, deploying all of them slightly below 19 minutes after liftoff.
The launch will add but extra satellites to SpaceX’s large Starlink constellation, which supplies web service to prospects around the globe.
Starlink already consists of more than 3,400 operational satellites (opens in new tab), and that eye-popping quantity will proceed to develop far into the long run. Elon Musk‘s firm already has permission to loft 12,000 Starlink spacecraft, and it has utilized for approval to deploy almost 30,000 extra satellites on high of that.
Thursday’s launch would be the sixth of 2023 already for SpaceX. If the corporate retains up this cadence — an enormous if, on condition that it is nonetheless solely January — it’s going to break its single-year launch file of 61, which it set in 2022.Â
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a ebook in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
