Simply after midnight at 12:07 am ET (05:07 UTC), 23 V2 mini Starlink satellites have been lofted into house from Area Launch Advanced 40 at Cape Canaveral Area Pressure Station in Florida.
The Falcon 9 with the Group 6-33 Starlink satellites launched to the Southeast to insert them into the identical 43-degree orbital inclination as earlier Group 6 missions.
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/iBETMTpR7m
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 7, 2023
As with the latest prior missions for Group 6, the satellites deployed from the 2nd stage simply over an hour after lift-off, with this launch, 5,559 Starlinks have been launched into orbit since 2018, together with the primary two prototypes, Tintin A and B. Of these, 4,530 are of their operational orbits, with extra becoming a member of the ranks as they bear their checkouts and lift themselves to the correct orbits. Of those 4,530, 327 are the V2 mini variant able to dealing with ~4x extra bandwidth than the older era, in response to Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink statistics website.
The Falcon 9 that was assigned to this mission was Booster 1077, which took a visit to house and again for the ninth time. B1077 final launched 37 days in the past and has now launched 4 Starlink missions, Crew 5 and CRS-28 to the ISS, and three communications satellites. The Falcon 9 made a gentle landing on the droneship “Simply Learn the Directions” following its portion of the mission.
This was additionally a fairly speedy turnaround for SLC 40, with it being simply over 4 days for the reason that final launch. The present report for SLC 40 is 3 days and 22 hours between launches.
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Simply Learn the Directions droneship pic.twitter.com/VG7Vbkzhes
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 7, 2023
If SpaceX is ready to get their launch pad turnaround time between launches down even a bit, that won’t solely assist them accomplish their aim of 100 launches this yr but additionally put them ready to exceed that in 2024. Whereas the pad turnaround time is certainly one thing the SpaceX floor crew is able to, they’re nonetheless a bit restricted in relation to recovering boosters because the look forward to a Falcon 9 to return on a droneship is round 3 days with good climate and it takes just a few days for the droneships to return again to touchdown areas within the Atlantic or Pacific ocean. If SpaceX is ready to additional make the most of the return to launch website functionality of the Falcon, that can put them in a significantly better place to far exceed 100 launches subsequent yr.
Subsequent up for SpaceX is one other early morning launch, this time a Starlink mission no sooner than December eighth at 12 am PT (08:00 UTC), and the Falcon Heavy continues to be focusing on the night of December tenth.
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