Just after midnight at 12:07 am ET (05:07 UTC), 23 V2 mini Starlink satellites were lofted into space from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The Falcon 9 with the Group 6-33 Starlink satellites launched to the Southeast to insert them into the identical 43-degree orbital inclination as previous Group 6 missions.
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/iBETMTpR7m
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 7, 2023
As with the recent prior missions for Group 6, the satellites deployed from the 2nd stage just over an hour after lift-off, with this launch, 5,559 Starlinks have been launched into orbit since 2018, including the primary two prototypes, Tintin A and B. Of those, 4,530 are of their operational orbits, with more joining the ranks as they undergo their checkouts and lift themselves to the right orbits. Of those 4,530, 327 are the V2 mini variant able to handling ~4x more bandwidth than the older generation, in response to Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink statistics site.
The Falcon 9 that was assigned to this mission was Booster 1077, which took a visit to space and back for the ninth time. B1077 last launched 37 days ago and has now launched 4 Starlink missions, Crew 5 and CRS-28 to the ISS, and three communications satellites. The Falcon 9 made a soft touchdown on the droneship “Just Read the Instructions” following its portion of the mission.
This was also a reasonably rapid turnaround for SLC 40, with it being just over 4 days for the reason that last launch. The present record for SLC 40 is 3 days and 22 hours between launches.
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/VG7Vbkzhes
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 7, 2023
If SpaceX is capable of get their launch pad turnaround time between launches down even a bit, that is not going to only help them accomplish their goal of 100 launches this yr but additionally put them able to exceed that in 2024. While the pad turnaround time is certainly something the SpaceX ground team is able to, they’re still a bit limited on the subject of recovering boosters because the wait for a Falcon 9 to return on a droneship is around 3 days with good weather and it takes a number of days for the droneships to return back to landing areas within the Atlantic or Pacific ocean. If SpaceX is capable of further utilize the return to launch site capability of the Falcon, that may put them in a significantly better position to far exceed 100 launches next yr.
Next up for SpaceX is one other early morning launch, this time a Starlink mission no sooner than December eighth at 12 am PT (08:00 UTC), and the Falcon Heavy continues to be targeting the evening of December tenth.