KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – Hours after four astronauts returned to Earth from the International Space Station, SpaceX successfully launched 53 Starlink satellites from Kennedy Space Center before sunrise Friday.
SpaceX launched the satellites atop its Falcon 9 rocket at 5:42 a.m. There have been more than 2,400 satellites launched by SpaceX so far.
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There were people who woke up early to see Friday’s launch.
“Pretty bloody cool. The light and the delay, hearing the sound and lighting up the whole sky. That’s pretty bloody cool. Not something we see back home,” said Max Stokes, who was visiting from Australia.
Andrew Stokes said he has been alive since the first Apollo and “to think about where we’ve come to now is just incredible.”
“What they’re doing is trying to connect the world, right? So, I kind of feel like if we can be more connected, that’s probably a good thing for us,” Andrew Stokes said.
The first-stage booster supporting this mission previously launched Crew Demo-2, ANASIS-II, CRS-21, Transporter-1, Transporter-3 and six other Starlink missions.
Following separation, Falcon 9′s first-stage booster returned to Earth and landed on the “A Shortfall of Gravitas,” an autonomous drone ship stationed out in the Atlantic Ocean.
This comes after SpaceX’s Crew-3 astronauts splashed down off Florida’s coast around 12:43 a.m. Friday.