Early on Thursday morning (January 26), SpaceX will launch another 56 of its Starlink Internet satellites into orbit, and you can watch the launch live. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying 56 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to launch from the Florida Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral at 04:22 ET (09:22 GMT) on Thursday.
If all goes according to plan, the two-stage Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth approximately eight minutes and 45 seconds after takeoff. The booster will vertically touch the SpaceX Just Read the Instructions drone, which will be placed in the Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles off the Florida coast.
This will be the ninth launch and landing of this launch vehicle. Previous flights include the Crew-3 and Crew-4 astronaut missions to the International Space Station for NASA, two robotic cargo flights to an orbiting laboratory, and a Starlink mission, SpaceX’s mission statement says.
The rocket’s upper stage will continue to launch 56 satellites into low Earth orbit, deploying all of them less than 19 minutes after launch. The launch will add even more satellites to SpaceX’s giant Starlink group, which provides internet services to customers around the world.
Starlink currently consists of more than 3,400 operational satellites and this staggering number will continue to increase in the distant future. Elon Musk’s company already has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink spacecraft and has applied for permission to deploy about 30,000 more satellites. Thursday’s launch will be the sixth of 2023 for SpaceX. If the company continues at this pace – a big “if” considering it’s only January – it will break its one-year record with 61 launches set in 2022.
Source: Port Altele
John Wilkes is a seasoned journalist and author at Div Bracket. He specializes in covering trending news across a wide range of topics, from politics to entertainment and everything in between.
