47 more Starlink satellites are actually in orbit after a successful launch atop a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The 47 Version 1.5 satellites launched at 12:19 a.m. PT (07:19 UTC) on a 43-degree orbital inclination. Following stage separation, the Falcon 9, Booster 1075, landed on the droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/z3Gdy7aiqp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 22, 2023
This time, a little bit of a special launch for SpaceX because the second stage performed a dog-leg maneuver and flew over the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, making it the bottom orbital inclination launch from the West Coast of the US.
This will not be the primary time SpaceX has had the second stage fly over land as they’ve flown over Cuba during roughly the identical stage of flight after launching from Florida on a polar orbit launch.
During this a part of the flight, the second stage is high enough in altitude and moving fast enough, to where, if there could be an anomaly, a overwhelming majority of the vehicle would burn up within the atmosphere and never pose any risk to anyone on the bottom.
With this launch, SpaceX has now launched 4,642 Starlink satellites, and of those, 3,688 are of their operational orbits, based on Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink tracker.
Completing this launch was Booster 1075 on its 4th flight, previously launching two Starlink missions and the Transport & Tracking Layer flight 1. This launch marked the fortieth Falcon 9 mission of the 12 months and the forty second orbital launch for SpaceX. Overall that’s now 206 consecutive successful Falcon 9 missions.
A brand new solution to view the launch was announced by SpaceX shortly before launch where you may switch between camera views on Twitter. It offered a novel solution to follow the mission because it progressed.
This feature gave you the choice to modify between the most important webcast, a view from droneship, a view from B1075 looking down towards the bottom of the rocket, and a view from the second stage. There have been also additional views of the launch pad itself, but it surely appears the replays of those views have been removed. Hopefully, we will see more of this for launches going forward.
Take a look at additional views of the @Starlink launch via @Twitter live → https://t.co/6PzgJ2efUL
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 22, 2023
Next up for SpaceX is one other batch of Starlink satellites, this time from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, no sooner than Friday morning, pending confirmation from SpaceX.