SpaceX launches another 52 Starlink internet satellites

SpaceX’s 40th launch of the year sent another batch of 52 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral early Monday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 UTC) Monday.

The mission followed a familiar track and timeline, with the Falcon 9 heading southeast from Florida’s Space Coast to place the 52 Starlink payloads into an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the equator. It took about 65 minutes from liftoff through separation of the Starlink satellites, which occurred over the Western Pacific Ocean.

Two braking burns slowed the rocket for landing on the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” around 400 miles (640 kilometers) downrange approximately eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. The reusable booster, designated B1073 in SpaceX’s inventory, made its ninth trip to space.

The launch was the first of two Falcon 9 rockets scheduled to take off Monday, with SpaceX teams at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California preparing a Falcon 9 for liftoff about 14 hours after the flight from Florida at 5:19 p.m. EDT (2:19 p.m. PDT; 2119 UTC). The launch from California will haul a group of 72 small spacecraft and payloads into polar orbit for a range of U.S. and international customers on SpaceX’s eighth small satellite rideshare mission.

The Cape Canaveral launch, named Starlink 5-11 in SpaceX’s launch sequence, brought the total number of Starlink satellites SpaceX has launched to 4,595. The Starlink network provides high-speed, low-latency connectivity to customers around the world. SpaceX says each Starlink launch adds more than a terabit per second of capacity to the constellation.

SpaceX currently has more than 4,200 functioning Starlink satellites in space, with more than 3,500 operational spacecraft and more than 500 moving into their operational orbits, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, an expert tracker of spaceflight activity and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The rest of the Starlink satellites were prototypes or failed platforms that have been retired from service and guided back into the atmosphere to burn up on re-entry.

Monday’s mission continued deployment of SpaceX’s older-generation Starlink V1.5 satellites, following launches earlier this year that started placing a new generation of Starlink satellites in orbit. The new satellites, known as the Starlink V2 Mini design, are larger and offer four times the broadband capacity of the older-design satellites.

The new Starlink V2 Minis carry upgraded phase array antennas and a more efficient, higher-thrust argon-fueled electric propulsion system. They also have two solar arrays, compared to a single extendable solar panel on each Starlink V1.5 spacecraft.

The Starlink V1.5 satellites on Monday’s Starlink 5-11 mission were similar to the Starlink spacecraft SpaceX has launched over the last few years, but they headed into an orbital plane that is, at least in regulatory terms, part of SpaceX’s second-generation, or Gen2, network.

SpaceX started launching satellites into the Gen2 network in December, beginning the population of new orbital planes with older-design satellites until the larger Starlink spacecraft design is ready to take over entirely.

The Starlink V2 Mini satellites that SpaceX started launching in February represent an intermediate step between the smaller Starlink V1.5 spacecraft and the even larger full-size Starlink V2s, which SpaceX plans to deploy in orbit using the company’s new Starship mega-rocket.

The Federal Communications granted SpaceX approval Dec. 1 to launch up to 7,500 of its planned 29,988-spacecraft Starlink Gen2 constellation, which will spread out into slightly different orbits than the original Starlink fleet. The regulatory agency deferred a decision on the remaining satellites SpaceX proposed for Gen2.