SpaceX just sent another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites into the final frontier.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 19 Starlink craft lifted off from California’s foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base today (July 31) at 2:35 p.m. EDT (1835 GMT; 11:35 a.m. local California time).
The rocket’s first stage came back to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship named “Of Course I Still Love You.”
It was the 27th launch and landing for this particular booster, which is designated 1071. That’s just two shy of the company’s reuse record, which was set earlier this month — and on the 500th overall Falcon 9 launch, no less.
Booster 1071’s previous missions
The Falcon 9’s upper stage continued carrying the 19 Starlink satellites toward low Earth orbit. That’s where they’ll be deployed 63 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan.
They’ll join the more than 8,000 other active satellites in the Starlink megaconstellation, the biggest spacecraft assemblage ever constructed.
Today’s Starlink launch — the 94th Falcon 9 mission of the year already — was supposed to be the second half of a spaceflight doubleheader. SpaceX tried to launch the Crew-11 astronaut mission to the International Space Station for NASA today but scrubbed the attempt with about a minute left on the countdown clock due to bad weather.
