After this "Scrubtember" and then "Scrubtober" Elon Musk's rocket company has messed up SpaceX's launch plan, trying to get more of its Starlink broadband satellites into orbit. The company's 14th stack of orbiting routers was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida Sunday morning, and airspace enclosures said another set of about 60 satellites is due to launch from Florida on Wednesday.
The launch on Sunday was courtesy of a flame tower at the end of a first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which made the sixth flight of its career. It landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic, potentially flying for another day. Both halves of the missile's nose cone were also captured by ships equipped with huge nets, although one appeared to be at least partially breaking through the net.
SpaceX and competitor United Launch Alliance Between the end of August and the beginning of October, several attempts to start were made due to weather and technical problems, which led to the rise of the hashtags #scrubtember and #scrubtober. Since then, SpaceX has managed to get two Starlink missions from the groundincluding this one on Sunday.
ONE SpaceX mission to launch a new military GPS satellite and a US spy satellite ULA launch remains on the ground while technical issues continue to be resolved.
Falcon 9 launches 60 Starlink satellites - one step closer to providing high-speed broadband Internet in places where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable pic.twitter.com/3J06rSFBqm
- SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 18, 2020
SpaceX will need to put thousands of its internet-radiating birds into low-earth orbit over the next few years to meet its FCC approval requirements. So far, over 700 satellites have been launched and more than 60 of the oldest models have been or will soon be desorbed. All of this means that SpaceX still has a long way to go in achieving its ultimate goal of creating a mega-constellation of tens of thousands of satellites.
SpaceflightNow.com reports that the mission is scheduled to start at 5:25 a.m. (8:25 a.m. in Florida) on Wednesday. As soon as the live video feed is available, we'll add it here.
