SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral
Baku, March 3, AZERTAC
SpaceX launched its first Falcon 9 rocket of the month and its first Starlink flight since reportedly reaching 5 million subscribers for the satellite internet service on Sunday night, according to SpaceFlight Now.
Liftoff of the Starlink 12-20 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 9:24 p.m. EST (0224 UTC on March 3). This was SpaceX’s 26th Falcon 9 rocket launch of the year.
SpaceX used the Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number B1086, to launch the mission. It flew for a fifth time after launching as a side booster on the Falcon Heavy GOES-U mission and then as a Falcon 9 booster for the third pair of Maxar’s WorldView Legion satellites and two Starlink missions.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1086 landed on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ This marked the 112th booster landing on JRTI and the 415th booster landing to date.
Among the 21 Starlink satellites on board, there were 13 that feature Direct to Cell capabilities. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 500 of these DTC capable satellites.
Starlink published a short video to its X account, marking the 5 million subscriber milestone, but the video visible now wasn’t the original. The first version of the video published included an image at the 39-second mark, which some speculated was an image of two Starshield satellites, the government variant of Starlink.
All of the missions for the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferated architecture constellation, which are reportedly populated by these Starshield satellites, feature launch broadcasts that intentionally don’t show the moment of satellite deployment.
If the two satellites in the now removed video are Starshield, it would be the first known released images of these satellites. SpaceX has not issued a statement on the reason it took down the original video or why it swapped out that image for a clip of Starlink satellite deployment.
Meanwhile, at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SpaceX is still working through an unspecified issue connected to the Falcon 9 rocket set to launch NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH spacecraft.
The mission was originally scheduled to launch February 27, but has now been delayed three times because of the rocket.
In a Friday blog update, NASA announced the mission would launch no earlier than Tuesday, March 4. The agency stated that “teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data.”
Then on Sunday, NASA posted a brief update, stating that the planned, prelaunch news conference would no longer take place on Monday, March 3. This suggests the possibility of another launch delay, but NASA did state that explicity.
“The agency will share more information as soon as possible,” NASA wrote.
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will conduct an all-sky spectral survey of the sky over a planned two-year mission. PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) is a collection of four satellites the will create “3D observations of the entire inner heliosphere to learn how the Sun’s corona becomes the solar wind,” according to NASA.
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