The reusable first phase of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle was used for launches for the 13th time.
American company SpaceX has successfully launched the Falcon 9 heavy launch vehicle. It launched another batch of 53 mini-satellites into orbit to replenish the orbital constellation of the Starlink system’s global Internet coverage network. It was learned on Thursday, July 7th.
“The launch of 53 Starlink satellites into orbit has been confirmed,” SpaceX said in a statement. Twitter.
The launch took place at 09:11 US East Coast time (4:11 Kyiv time) from the 40th launch complex of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
After approximately 15.5 minutes of launch, 53 satellites diverted from the second phase of the rocket into an elliptical transfer orbit up to 340 km altitude. After SpaceX engineers evaluate their performance, the satellites using their own ion engines will rise into a regular orbit with an altitude of approximately 540 km.
The reusable first phase of the American Falcon 9 launch vehicle, used for launch for the 13th time, approximately 8.5 minutes after launch, made a controlled vertical landing on the Just Read the Instructions floating drone platform, which is in the Atlantic about 650 km from the spaceport.
This is the 50th launch of a group of Internet satellites into orbit since May 2019 as part of the Starlink project. Internet satellites have become part of the orbital constellation of SpaceX.
Since then, SpaceX has launched more than 2,759 Starlink internet satellites. Some of them failed or went out of orbit. Approximately 2.5 thousand devices are in orbit in working condition.
Today, the company is the largest satellite operator in the world. According to SpaceX, the Starlink Internet network is available to users in 32 countries around the world, including North America, Europe, the Far East and Australia.
In the future, SpaceX plans to deploy an orbital constellation of 12,000 spacecraft of this type (and then 30,000) to create a full-scale network that will give Earth’s inhabitants broadband Internet access anywhere in the world. The total investment in the project is estimated at $ 10 billion.
On Thursday, Russia successfully launched a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with a GLONASS-K navigation satellite from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region.
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Source: korrespondent
