With a few minutes left on the countdown clock until SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral with 60 Starlink satellites, the company had announced a new launch window targeting at 11 p.m. EDT (Thursday 11 a.m. GMT+8).
Live coverage will begin 15 minutes before launch on SpaceX's webcast.
The 60 Starlink satellites packed aboard the Falcon 9 rocket will begin deploying from the launcher’s upper stage around 62 minutes after liftoff, while flying in daylight over Tasmania. SpaceX’s webcast will show the deployment sequence.
“It will be a little different looking deployment than people are used to,” Musk told reporters earlier this evening. “It’s going to be a very slow deployment where we rotate the stage, and each of the satellites on the stack has a slightly different amount of rotational inertia.
“So there’s not actually a spring-based or specific deployment mechanism per satellite,” he said. The satellites will kind of be deployed, it’s almost like spreading a deck of cards on table. This will be kind of weird compared to normal satellite deployments.”
Elon Musk also tweeted on the social media that the Starlink mission will be the heaviest SpaceX payload ever at 18.5 tons. If all goes well, each launch of 60 satellites will generate more power than Space Station and deliver 1 terabit of bandwidth to Earth.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 that will launch 60 Starlink satellites into orbit is also the same booster that previously flew the Telstar 18 VANTAGE and Iridium-8 missions. This will be the third flight of the booster B1049 and it will be returned to the company’s drone ship Of Course I Still Love You after separated from the second stage around 3 minutes after launch.
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