SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched 60 new Starlink satellites early Thursday morning.
The Falcon 9 booster was lifted from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:24 a.m. ET, just hours after the Starship prototype rocket exploded after completing a test flight in Texas on Wednesday.
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The Falcon 9 rocket’s booster returned to Earth and land the landing about eight-and-a-half minutes later aboard SpaceX’s drone ship “Of course I still love you,” which floats a few hundred miles further in the Atlantic Ocean.
“It will recognize our 75th successful launch of a launch vehicle and the eighth recovery of this particular booster,” SpaceX Dragon propulsion engineer Youmei Zhou announced during a live stream of the launch.
Thursday’s launch according to Space.com, it is also the 109th flight for SpaceX’s flagship rocket.
The implementation of the 60 satellites took place just over an hour after the launch time.
The highly anticipated launch has already been postponed three times this week, aborted by an automatic trigger and bad weather conditions, NASASpacelight.com reported on Thursday.
This is the company’s sixth mission this year and its 20th Starlink mission.
There are already more than 1,200 Starlink satellites in orbit – some of which are no longer in operation – according to Fox 35 Orlando the largest constellation of artificial satellites.
Earlier this year, SpaceX opened access to the satellites for members of the public in a current or planned service area with a pre-order booking system.
The company plans to launch tens of thousands more to expand coverage, network capacity and speed.
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In a tweet of 22 February, Musk said the constellation will provide active coverage to most of the earth by 2021 and complete global coverage by 2022.