The Falcon 9 rocket on Friday successfully injected into orbit another batch of 52 mini-satellites to replenish the orbital constellation of the Starlink global Internet coverage network, the developer SpaceX said.
“The launch of the 52 Starlink satellites has been confirmed,” the statement said.
The launch took place from the SLC-4E launch pad at U.S. Space Force Base Vandenberg in California at 12:26 p.m. U.S. Pacific Coast Time.
It was the 78th launch of Internet satellites since May 2019 as part of the Starlink project and the ninth since the beginning of this year. Including the current launch, SpaceX has already put more than 4,100 such satellites into orbit. Some of them have failed or fallen out of orbit. More than 3.8 thousand devices remain in orbit in working condition.
As part of the launch, the first reusable stage launch vehicle Falcon 9, which was used for the eighth time, about nine minutes after launch, made a controlled vertical landing on a floating drone platform Of Course I Still Love You, which was located in the Pacific Ocean, 670 km from the base.
The company is currently the largest satellite operator in the world. The Starlink Internet network is available to users in 50 countries, including North America, Europe, the Far East and Australia. According to the Pentagon, the services of these satellites are also actively used by the U.S. military.
In the future SpaceX plans to deploy an orbital constellation of 12 thousand spacecraft (and in the future – from 30 thousand) to create a full-scale network, which will provide residents of the earth broadband Internet access anywhere in the world. The total amount of investments in implementation of the project is estimated at $10 billion.
