A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink spacecraft streaked into the afternoon sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday at 4:28 p.m. EST (2128 GMT). The launch had originally been planned for Sunday evening, but was delayed due to “unfavorable recovery weather conditions,” according to SpaceX. It was also pushed back nearly a half-hour on launch day.
About 8 minutes after launch, the Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth for a vertical touchdown on the SpaceX droneship “A Shortfall of Gravitas,” which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was the 12th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. Five of its previous 11 flights were Starlink missions.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 24 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) and was expected to deploy them there about 65 minutes after liftoff.
Monday’s launch followed on the heels of another Starlink mission, which lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base early on Saturday morning (Nov. 9). It also came just over four hours after a different Falcon 9 rocket launched the Koreasat-6A communications satellite from NASA’s Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier on Monday.
SpaceX has now launched 106 Falcon 9 missions in 2024. Nearly 70% of them have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 6,500 active spacecraft.
