A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will set a brand new reusability record early Sunday morning (July 8), and you may watch the motion live.
A Falcon 9 topped with 22 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink web satellites is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Sunday at 4:36 a.m. ET (0836 GMT). It’ll be the unprecedented sixteenth mission for the rocket’s first stage, in response to SpaceX.
You’ll be able to watch the launch live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the corporate. Coverage is predicted to start about five minutes before liftoff.
Related: SpaceX’s Starlink satellite megaconstellation launches in photos
If all goes in response to plan, the booster will come back to Earth for one more landing, within the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. It’ll touch down on the deck of the SpaceX droneship Just Read the Instructions about 8.5 minutes after liftoff.
The Falcon 9’s expendable upper stage, meanwhile, will proceed hauling the 22 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit. The batch is scheduled to be deployed there 62 minutes after launch.
The 22 satellites are apparently “V2 Minis,” a more recent and more powerful version of SpaceX’s broadband craft. They’re actually greater than the previous Starlink iteration, about 50 of which might fit on a Falcon 9. But they’re “mini” in comparison with the ultimate V2 satellites, 1.25-ton (1.1 metric tons) spacecraft that can launch aboard SpaceX’s giant, next-gen Starship vehicle.
“V2 minis include key technologies — reminiscent of more powerful phased array antennas and using E-band for backhaul — which is able to allow Starlink to offer ~4x more capability per satellite than earlier iterations,” SpaceX said via Twitter in February.
The Falcon 9 first stage that is flying on Sunday morning last launched in December 2022. Amongst its 15 previous flights are Demo-2, SpaceX’s first-ever crewed mission, which sent two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020.
The booster isn’t a reuse outlier; one other Falcon 9 first stage has 15 flights under its belt, and just a few others have launched 14 times.
Starship will take reflight to a different level, if all goes in response to plan. The enormous vehicle, essentially the most powerful rocket ever built, is designed to be fully reusable. And each of its stages might be able to flying multiple times in a single day, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.