SpaceX plans to launch one other batch of its Starlink web satellites to orbit tonight (Aug. 25), and you’ll be able to watch the motion live.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station tonight at 9:30 p.m. EDT (0130 GMT on Aug. 26). The launch will take the entire variety of Starlink satellites lofted to this point to over 5,000, based on astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. (The tally currently stands at 4,983.)
You may watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the corporate. Coverage is predicted to begin about five minutes before launch.
Related: Starlink satellite train: see and track it within the night sky
The Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth tonight, if all goes based on plan: It’s scheduled to land on the SpaceX drone ship Just Read the Instructions about 8.5 minutes after liftoff.
It’s going to be the third launch and landing for this particular booster, based on a SpaceX mission description.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage will carry on flying, eventually deploying the 22 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) about 65 minutes after launch.
Tonight’s Starlink launch is scheduled to precede one other SpaceX mission from Florida’s Space Coast: The corporate goals to launch the four-astronaut Crew-7 mission toward the International Space Station from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center early Saturday morning (Aug. 26). Crew-7 had been scheduled to get off the bottom on Friday morning, but SpaceX pushed it back by 24 hours to conduct more analyses.
Five thousand Starlink satellites is so much to be certain, however the number is more likely to grow far into the longer term. SpaceX has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, and it has applied for permission for about 30,000 more on top of that.