CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – SpaceX on Tuesday launched 23 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:17 p.m. Tuesday with a mostly clear sky for its backdrop.
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The launch marks the ninth for the first-stage booster, which previously launched Crew-6, SES O3b mPOWER, USSF-124, and five Starlink missions.
Following stage separation, the first stage landed successfully on the Just Read the Instructions droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
What is Starlink?
Starlink is a satellite internet constellation, providing coverage to over 70 countries.
After development began in 2015, post-prototype Starlink deployments started in May 2019, at a time when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he could expect as many as 2,000 of the satellites to be deployed each year. The small satellites communicate directly with ground transceivers to achieve Musk’s stated goal of providing broadband internet worldwide, everywhere from packed suburban neighborhoods to remote dead zones.
The official Starlink website now advertises unlimited home service at $120 per month in most locations after a $599 hardware purchase. An interactive map on the Starlink website suggests most people in the continental U.S. are in range and eligible.
More than 2.6 million customers now use Starlink, according to a study shared by the Starlink team in March that otherwise updated recent efforts to bring down latency — or the time it takes for data to travel from source to destination — to below 20 ms.
Daniel R. Dahm
SpaceX afterFX, as seen from Oviedo.