SpaceX has launched another 28 satellites for its Starlink internet constellation, carrying the total to 60, with 1,500 or more planned in the years ahead. The latest batch was boosted into low orbit from a Falcon 9 rocket Friday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the ninth cable-sat launch in a series of an estimated 12,000 and possibly as many as 42,000 the company ultimately hopes to orbit to provide high-speed communications and internet service to underserved regions of the world.
The company then confirmed the successful deployment of the payload shortly after liftoff, extending a launch cadence which is on pace to set commercial spaceflight records.
Mission higlights and booster performance
The flight, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, concluded with a successful rocket orbital insertion nearly an hour and a half after liftoff.
SpaceX called the first stage Booster 1077, which was completing its 23rd mission when it landed on the droneship Just Read the Instructions. That count extends the practical frontier of rapid reusability, turnarounds now measured in weeks and life-extension practices honed via iterative refurbishment.
Still more lifting margin comes from the nine Merlin engines of Falcon 9 and the guidance design for engine-out capability which means it can continue the mission with an engine failure in the early part of ascent. With reflight numbers topping 20 on several cores, the data behind reusability has gone from demonstration to statistical confidence, a change industry analysts say is drastically altering launch economics for both constellations and third-party customers.
Constellation Grow Out and Network Effects
The independent tracking by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell shows that the Starlink network now consists of over 8,280 active satellites out of over 9,575 that have been launched since 2019. The constellation orbits at between about 340 and 570 kilometers in order to provide low latency and faster orbital decay for any satellite that may not function or is retired.
Batch sizes vary — 28 on this flight — according to orbital plane targeting, satellite mass and mission energy. SpaceX has been flying its “V2 Mini” platforms, consisting of larger solar arrays and payloads with greater throughput. These vehicles are propelled by xenon Hall-effect thrusters, an interesting choice which allows lowering the cost of propellant, and enables orbit raising, station-keeping and end-of-life disposal.
On the regulatory side, the Federal Communications Commission has authorized deployment of 7,500 second-generation satellites so far, a portion of SpaceX’s larger filings. The company’s goal is to extend coverage and capacity to support residential customers, mobile platforms and enterprise and government users, and coverage The coverage now spans over most of populated areas. Ultimately, performance will be a function of local cell loading; more satellite pairings and inter-satellite laser links allow traffic to be dynamically shifted as needed in order to preserve performance during peak usage.
Orbital safety, visibility and policy context
Starlink satellites are maneuverable, supported with collision-avoidance capability to keep them from bumping into other spacecraft in low Earth orbit, and are programmed to automatically deorbit upon completion of their mission, and passivate to reduce the risks of having large, dead satellites in orbit. Operating in low Earth orbit, the mode speeds up the natural decay timescale and conforms to the FCC’s disposal rule of placement in an atmospheric disposal orbit within five years after completion of mission for non-geostationary satellites. The U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron monitors the fleet and releases so-called conjunction data messages to aid in collision prevention among the spacefaring community as a whole.
Current trends in sky brightening and radio interference continue to be hot issues for astronomers and satellite operators. Engineering steps such as darker coatings, specular reduction features and careful attitude control during orbit raising have been applied to reduce the reflected light compared to the early models, according to reports presented via the International Astronomical Union’s SATCON and Dark & Quiet Skies workshops. Coordination with observatories and spectrum managers will remain important as deployment grows.
Cadence and what’s next
The mission is part of a pace of operations that is now exceeding a hundred flights a year, with the vast majority of those on Falcon 9 but also suborbital tests of the company’s next-generation vehicle. The timeframe for high-frequency launches is two-fold: increasing Starlink capacity, while providing flight heritage to reusable hardware and operations that are the cornerstone to building deep-space aspirations.
For end users, incremental launches means denser coverage, more optical crosslink backhaul options and less contention during peak operational hours. For the wider industry, the unbroken pace will serve as a kind of living laboratory in reliability engineering, in manufacturing scale and in space traffic coordination that agencies, researchers and competitors alike will be watching as the constellation keeps growing.