SpaceX launched 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites and a rocket landing at sea on this year’s 60th flight.
SpaceX launched the first batch of a new generation of Starlink satellites into orbit early Wednesday (December 28) and announced a rocket landing at sea marking the 60th flight this year.
A Falcon 9 rocket with 54 Starlink internet satellites — the first generation 2 (Gen2) of the SpaceX fleet — lit up the pre-dawn sky with a smooth launch at 4:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT) from Cape Canaveral SpaceX Station in Florida.
“Under our new license, we are now able to deploy satellites into new orbits that will add more capacity to the network,” SpaceX director of production and engineering Jesse Anderson said during a live launch commentary. “Ultimately, this enables us to add more customers and provide faster service, especially in areas that are currently oversubscribed.”
Related: 10 strange things about SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites
About eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth with its landing on SpaceX’s unmanned A Shortfall of Gravitas ship in the Atlantic Ocean, where severe recovery weather threatened to delay the launch. The landing marked the successful end of SpaceX’s 60th launch in 2022, nearly doubling the 31 launches recorded as a SpaceX record in 2021.
The Falcon 9 first stage on this mission made its 11th flight with a launch on Wednesday. The booster has previously flown five Starlink missions, launched two US GPS satellites, the Nilesat 301 commercial satellite, and carried two different private space crews on the Inspiration4 and Ax-1 missions.
Anderson said the company will also try to recover the two payload-width halves that made up the Falcon 9’s nose cone, which were moved before, for later reuse.
SpaceX’s Starlink Gen2 is said to be more powerful than the 3,300 or so currently in orbit, and it looks like SpaceX needs a bandwidth boost. Its broadband network is facing congestion problems despite sending hundreds of first-generation Starlink satellites aloft this year, the latest from SpaceNews. (Opens in a new tab) The report suggested.
“Starlink is a satellite internet constellation designed and manufactured by SpaceX to provide high-speed, low-latency internet to people living in remote locations and regions around the world,” said Anderson.
On December 1, the FCC granted SpaceX approval to deploy 7,500 second-generation satellites. This was only a partial approval, however, as SpaceX applied to the FCC for permission to send nearly 30,000 of these satellites into low Earth orbit.
Besides being able to handle more traffic, Gen2 satellites can send service directly to smartphones, said SpaceX founder Elon Musk. While that crop goes to space aboard the Falcon 9, SpaceX eventually plans to use the massive Starship rocket, which is under development and 18 months awaiting approval to fly into space.
Editor’s note: This story, originally published Dec. 27, was updated on Dec. 28 to include Starlink 5-1 launch results and a correction for the number of times the Falcon 9 Booster flew. It was her eleventh mission.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (Opens in a new tab)? (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @tweet (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @tweet (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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