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A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to liftoff from the West Coast with one other batch of satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink network at 12:03 a.m. PST Friday (2:03 a.m. EST / 0803 UTC).
The Starlink 7-8 mission will liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and depart on a south-easterly direction, targeting a 183×178 mile (295×286 km) orbit, inclined at 53 degrees to the equator.
Spaceflight Now will provide live coverage of Falcon 9 liftoff in our Launch Pad Live stream.
The primary stage booster, making its thirteenth flight, previously launched the NROL-87, NROL-85, SARah-1, SWOT, Transporter-8, Transporter-9 missions. Plus six previous Starlink delivery missions. After completing its burn, the primary stage will land on the drone ship ‘Of Course I still Love You’ stationed about 400 miles downrange (644km) within the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.
If all goes in keeping with plan, deployment of the 22 V2 Mini Starlink satellites will occur just over an hour after launch. The V2 Mini model was introduced earlier this 12 months and is far larger than the V1.5 satellites. Equipped with upgraded antennae and bigger solar panels, the newest models can delivery 4 times the bandwidth of the previous satellites.
SpaceX recently announced earlier this 12 months it had signed up over two million subscribers in greater than 60 countries for its Starlink web service. Since 2019 it has launched 5,559 satellites in keeping with statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer on the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who maintains a space flight database. Of those satellites 5,186 remain in orbit and 5,147 seem like working normally.