A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is ready to launch 23 Starlink web satellites tonight (Oct. 29), on the second of two planned missions for the day.
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station tonight at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT). If the Falcon 9 cannot get off the bottom on time, seven backup opportunities can be found, from 8:17 p.m. EDT to 10:47 p.m. EDT (0017 to 0247 GMT on Oct. 30), in accordance with a SpaceX mission description.
You possibly can watch the motion live via SpaceX’s account on X (formerly often called Twitter). Coverage will start about five minutes before liftoff.
Related: Starlink satellite train: The right way to see and track it within the night sky
If all goes in accordance with plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth for a vertical landing about 8.5 minutes after launch on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which shall be stationed within the Atlantic Ocean.
It should be the eighth launch and landing for this rocket’s first stage, in accordance with the mission description.
The 23 Starlink satellites will deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage into low Earth orbit about 65.5 minutes after liftoff, if all goes in accordance with plan.
Tonight’s launch is the second half of a planned Sunday Starlink doubleheader. SpaceX was scheduled to send 22 Starlink craft skyward from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base early Sunday morning.
Starlink is SpaceX’s broadband megaconstellation, which beams web service all the way down to customers world wide. SpaceX has launched greater than 5,000 Starlink satellites to LEO to this point, and lots of more liftoffs are coming: The corporate has permission to deploy 12,000 of the spacecraft, and it has applied for approval for an additional 30,000 on top of that.