SpaceX plans to loft 22 of its Starlink broadband satellites early Monday morning (Oct. 9) on the second half of a launch doubleheader.
The Starlink spacecraft are scheduled to lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base at 3:23 a.m. EDT (0723 GMT and 12:23 a.m. local California time). 4 backup opportunities can be found as well, from 4:14 a.m. EDT until 7:46 a.m. EDT (0814 to 1146 GMT).
You possibly can watch the motion live via SpaceX’s account on X (formerly referred to as Twitter) . Coverage will begin about five minutes before liftoff.
Related: Starlink satellite train: Learn how to see and track it within the night sky
If all goes in keeping with plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth for a vertical landing at sea on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You about 8.5 minutes after launch.
It can be the 14th liftoff and landing for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, in keeping with a SpaceX mission description. One in every of its previous launches lofted NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which intentionally slammed a probe into an asteroid in September 2022.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, will deploy the 22 Starlink spacecraft into low Earth orbit about 62.5 minutes after launch.
Monday morning’s Starlink launch might be the second of two back-to-back Starlink launches, if all goes in keeping with plan. A Falcon 9 is scheduled to loft 22 Starlinks from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday (Oct. 8) at 9:06 p.m. EDT (0106 GMT on Oct. 9).
Starlink is SpaceX’s web megaconstellation, which currently consists of greater than 4,800 operational spacecraft. But that number continues to rise, as these two Starlink launches show.