SpaceX added yet more satellites to its ever-growing Starlink web megaconstellation on Monday night (Nov. 27).
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday at 11:20 p.m. EST (0420 GMT on Nov. 28).
Related: Starlink satellite train: How one can see and track it within the night sky
The Falcon 9’s first stage got here back to Earth for a vertical landing about 8.5 minutes after launch. It touched down on the droneship “Just Read the Instructions,” which was stationed within the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.
It was the seventeenth launch and landing for this particular booster, in accordance with a SpaceX mission description.
The 23 Starlink satellites, meanwhile, were scheduled to deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage into low Earth orbit (LEO) about 65.5 minutes after liftoff.
The Starlink network, which beams web service right down to people all over the world, already features greater than 5,000 operational spacecraft, in accordance with astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
But that number keeps growing, and sure will far into the longer term. SpaceX already has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink craft into LEO, and it has applied for approval for an additional 30,000 on top of that.