SpaceX will launch another big batch of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit today (July 7), and you can watch the action 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 can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company. Coverage is expected to start about five minutes before launch.
Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky
If all goes according to 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 will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean. This milestone will occur about eight minutes and 50 seconds after liftoff.
It will be the 12th launch and landing for this particular booster, SpaceX wrote in a mission description.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage will continue 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 date, 4,365 of which are currently operational, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
But many more Starlink batches will go up in the near future. The company has approval to deploy about 12,000 of the internet satellites in LEO, and it has applied for permission for another 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, according to some experts. For example, Starlink satellites performed 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in a six-month span recently, and that number is only going to go up as more and more spacecraft reach orbit.
