![Starlink 6-17 launches from Florida on Tuesday night.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/starlink6-17-800x533.jpg)
SpaceX
SpaceX launched its 67th rocket of the yr on Tuesday night, a staggering total for the corporate and its workhorse booster, the Falcon 9. At this pace, a clip of 1 launch every 4 days, the corporate is more likely to launch 90 or more rockets during this calendar yr.
This Starlink satellite launch was notable for a few other reasons. It marked the primary time SpaceX has reused a Falcon 9 first stage 17 times. This booster, serial number 1058, had previously flown 11 previous Starlink missions together with GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, and Transporter-6.
SpaceX performed a reasonably significant assessment of booster wear and tear after its first Falcon 9 stages reached 15 flights, and the corporate’s engineers now consider the rockets can achieve at the very least 20 flights. Remarkably, SpaceX has been in a position to push the boundaries of booster reuse while maintaining a one hundred pc record of success across the Falcon 9 rocket’s last 228 launches, dating to a pad explosion in September 2016.
As a part of its maintenance process, SpaceX still does some basic inspections and replaces engines and other critical components once in a while. Moreover, the corporate only risks its own internally built Starlink satellites on essentially the most experienced boosters, reserving rockets with less mileage for its customers.
Minimal webcasts
On its webcast of Tuesday night’s launch, the “Starlink Group 6-17 mission,” SpaceX also continued its trend toward a minimalist broadcast approach. The corporate still provides a hosted webcast for external satellite customers and partners with NASA for crew and cargo launches. But for Starlink, as of last month, the corporate now only provides a video feed with minimal audio from the launch control center. This video begins at five minutes before liftoff.
It could possibly be argued that that is the right approach to Starlink launches, which occur ceaselessly now and are largely the identical flight profile from mission to mission. One among SpaceX’s earliest employees, Hans Koenigsmann, once told me that one in every of the corporate’s goals was to take the “magic” out of launch. And with these regular Starlink launches, the corporate has largely succeeded in taking the must-see out of liftoff.
Moreover, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has never been an enormous proponent of launch webcasts. His attitude is basically that nobody hosts a webcast when an airplane takes off from an airport. So, if SpaceX strives for airline-type operations, why should it broadcast every launch?
But Musk also understands the worth of showcasing the corporate’s work. Furthermore, external customers love the visibility and public relations of a webcast. This probably explains why non-Starlink missions still feature hosted and (barely) more elaborate webcasts.
Et tu, YouTube?
One decision that, from the attitude of broadening SpaceX’s reach and appeal, doesn’t seem defensible is Musk’s decision to remove SpaceX webcasts from YouTube.
As a substitute, SpaceX now streams its webcasts exclusively on X, the social network formerly generally known as Twitter, which Musk acquired for $44 billion. Presumably, just as SpaceX stopped posting latest images to Flickr, this decision was made because Musk views YouTube as a competitor to X.
This has resulted in a lower-quality video resolution, in addition to a number of other issues that degrade the experience for online viewers. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that alternative launch streams by NASASpaceflight.com and Spaceflight Now appeared to have larger audiences for Tuesday night’s Starlink launch.