UPDATE: SpaceX has set a new launch time for today’s Starlink satellite launch. The company is now heading to 6:59 a.m. EDT (1059 GMT), a 39-minute delay.
SpaceX plans to launch another 53 Starlink satellites and land a returning rocket on a ship at sea early Wednesday morning (May 18), and you can watch the whole action live.
Two-stage Falcon 9 rocket with 53 Starlink the spacecraft is scheduled to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 6:59 a.m. EDT (1059 GMT). The first stage of the rocket will land on SpaceX drone A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean about nine minutes after takeoff, if all goes according to plan.
You can watch everything unfold here on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly through the company. Coverage is expected to begin about 10 minutes before takeoff. The live stream will end shortly after the booster lands, if previous Starlink webcasts are a guide. So the live broadcast is unlikely to include the deployment of Starlink satellites, which is expected to happen about an hour after launch.
Connected: SpaceX’s Starlink megastar launches in photos
Starlink is the broadband constellation of SpaceX, which currently consists of more than 2300 satellites. This number has been growing rapidly recently; SpaceX launched 20 missions in 2022, 13 of which are dedicated to Starlink flights.
But the Starlink population could become really huge in the not-too-distant future; the version of the next generation of the constellation may ultimately consist of up to 30,000 satellites.
Wednesday’s mission will be the fifth for this particular first phase of Falcon 9. Such reuse is a priority for SpaceX and its founder and CEO, Elon Muskwhich sees fast and repetitive flights as a key breakthrough needed to make ambitious research exploits such as the settlement of Mars economically feasible.
SpaceX has landed the first stages of the Falcon 9 113 times during orbital missions so far and transferred boosters 92 times, according to the company’s website.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow it on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
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