SpaceX will launch one other big batch of its Starlink web satellites to orbit today (July 7), and you possibly can watch the motion live.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 48 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 3:29 p.m. EDT (1929 GMT; 12:29 p.m. local time).
You possibly can watch it 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: The right way to see and track it within the night sky
If all goes based on plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth for a vertical touchdown on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You, which might be stationed within the Pacific Ocean. This milestone will occur about eight minutes and 50 seconds after liftoff.
It can be the twelfth launch and landing for this particular booster, SpaceX wrote in a mission description.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage will proceed hauling the Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO). All of them are scheduled to be deployed there about 19 minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX has launched nearly 4,700 Starlink satellites to this point, 4,365 of that are currently operational, based on astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
But many more Starlink batches will go up within the near future. The corporate has approval to deploy about 12,000 of the web satellites in LEO, and it has applied for permission for one more 30,000 on top of that.
The megaconstellation has drawn the ire of some astronomers, who say that its many satellites are hindering their observations.
The ever-growing network also poses a threat to space sustainability over the long haul, based on some experts. For instance, Starlink satellites performed 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in a six-month span recently, and that number is just going to go up as increasingly spacecraft reach orbit.