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A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the West Coast with another batch of satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink network at 12:03 am PST Friday (3:03 am EST / 0803 UTC).
The Starlink 7-8 mission launched from Space Launch Complex 4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and took off in a southeasterly direction, targeting a 183 × 178 mile (295 × 286 km) orbit, facing at 53 degrees at the equator. The SpaceX website experienced technical difficulties and did not show the lift.
The first stage of the booster, making its 13th flight, launched the first NROL-87, NROL-85, SArah-1, SWOT, Transporter-8, Transporter-9 missions. Plus the first six Starlink missions. After the fire, the first step on the ship ‘Of Course I still love you’ was located about 400 miles down (644km) in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.
If everything goes according to plan, the installation of 22 Starlink satellites will happen within an hour of launch. This is the 40th launch for a portion of the V2 Mini Starlink model since it was launched earlier this year. This new version is larger than the previous V1.5 satellites and is equipped with improved antennae and larger solar panels, and can provide four times more bandwidth.
SpaceX recently announced at the beginning of this year that it has signed up more than two million subscribers in more than 60 countries for its Starlink internet service. Before Friday the Starlink 7-8 mission launched 5,559 satellites according to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronaut at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who maintains a space flight data. Of those satellites 5,186 remain in orbit and 5,147 appear to be working normally.