A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is poised to launch 21 Starlink web satellites to orbit from California early Saturday morning (Oct. 21).
The Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday at 3:47 a.m. EDT (0747 GMT; 12:47 a.m. local California time). If SpaceX cannot hit that focus on, there are three backup opportunities available between 4:23 a.m. EDT and 6:00 a.m. EDT (0823 to 1000 GMT).
SpaceX will webcast the launch via its account on X (formerly generally known as Twitter). Coverage will start about five minutes before liftoff.
Related: Starlink satellite train: The way to see and track it within the night sky
If all goes based on plan on Saturday morning, the Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth safely, touching down at sea on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You about 8.5 minutes after launch.
It can be the sixteenth flight for this particular rocket’s first stage, based on a SpaceX mission description. That is one shy of the corporate’s reuse record, which was set last month.
The 21 Starlink satellites, meanwhile, are scheduled to deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage about 62.5 minutes after launch.
The liftoff will likely be the seventy fifth orbital mission for SpaceX in 2023. The corporate is aiming for 100 flights by the tip of this 12 months and 144 in 2024.
About 60% of this 12 months’s flights have been dedicated to constructing out Starlink, SpaceX’s web megaconstellation. Starlink currently consists of nearly 4,900 operational satellites, and that number will proceed to grow far into the longer term.