SpaceX’s stunning video shows 21 new SpaceX Starlink “V2 mini” satellites leaving the Falcon 9 rocket after launch on Monday, February 27, founder Elon Musk shared on Twitter. The satellites were launched into their first mission Monday at 6:13 pm ET (23:13 pm GMT) from the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first stage of Falcon 9 returned to Earth aboard SpaceX’s A Shortfall of Gravitas unmanned spacecraft 8.5 minutes after launching in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

These mini test satellites will be used before the full-size Starlink V2s are deployed aboard Starship, which can lift larger 1.25-ton (1,130-kilogram) satellites into orbit when ready for launch. Starship’s test launch could happen later this month. According to SpaceX, the satellites themselves were deployed about 64.5 minutes after launch. A new video from the company shows a boom-mounted camera being launched away from the satellites as the satellites leave the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket.

“The V2 mini includes key technologies such as more powerful phased antenna arrays and the use of electronic band for relay communications that will enable Starlink to deliver approximately 4x the throughput per satellite over previous iterations,” SpaceX said on Twitter. said. Sunday.

The V2 mini also features space-first argon Hall thrusters. In another Sunday tweet, SpaceX said the new engines “have 2.4 times the thrust of our first generation engines and 1.5 times the special thrust.”

SpaceX has more than 4,000 Starlink satellites launched for Internet services worldwide and plans to ship more. SpaceX has received regulatory approval to launch 12,000 Starlink spacecraft and has sought approval to deploy nearly 30,000 satellites. The company had originally scheduled three launches on Monday, but the other two were delayed. Crew-6’s scheduled takeoff that day was canceled at the end of the countdown due to a problem with the ground system. The next possible launch of Crew-6 will take place on Thursday, March 2 at 12:34 PM ET (05:34 GMT).

The company also scheduled a Starlink launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday afternoon, now scheduled for 2:20 p.m. ET (7:20 p.m. GMT, or 11:20 p.m. local time).