After being stymied by back-to-back scrubs on consecutive nights, SpaceX managed to launch the Starlink 12-17 mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Saturday night. The mission marked the 400th launch of a flight proven booster.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A took place at 8:53 p.m. EDT (12:53 UTC) against a cloudless night sky.
SpaceX used the Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number B1083, for this mission. It was its 10th flight to space and back after previously launching missions, like the crewed missions of Polaris Dawn and Crew-8 as well as Intuitive Machines’ second Nova-C lunar lander.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1083 landed on the droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas. This marked the 104th booster landing for ASOG and the 429th booster landing to date.
Among the 21 Starlink V2 Mini satellites were 13 that feature Direct to Cell capabilities. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 550 DTC Starlink satellites. This was the 28th Starlink satellite launch so far in 2025.
On Thursday, Michael Nicholls, the vice president of Starlink Engineering at SpaceX, shared that the DTC service was newly available to those in Japan in partnership with KDDI, a Japanese telecommunication operator, which has the “au” brand for its mobile phones.
The company said in a post on X that the service would be available to more than six million devices.
SpaceX is also continuing to expand the reach of its satellite internet service. It announced the addition of Guyana on Tuesday and Jordan on Wednesday.
