SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 Starlink satellites at dawn Monday, capping a long, busy weekend for the launch company that saw three launches and two countdowns canceled over four days.
Falcon 9, making its 17th flight, lifted off from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:37 a.m. EDT (1037 UTC), 13 minutes before sunrise on Florida’s Space Coast. The successful liftoff came after a two-day delay for the Starlink 10-7 mission.
The first launch attempt, originally scheduled for Saturday, was abandoned when the rocket failed to arrive at the pad in time to meet its four-hour launch window. Then on Sunday, with less than a minute left until liftoff, an abort was ordered just seconds after the mission’s launch director gave his final “go-ahead” for the launch. SpaceX said in a social media post that the countdown had “stopped” and did not give a reason for the abort.
Monday’s liftoff was SpaceX’s third in less than 46 hours. Another Starlink mission, dubbed Starlink 8-3, launched Saturday morning from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Station, following a daylong delay caused by bad weather in the booster recovery area. And on Sunday afternoon, Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission (ASBM) lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 from SpaceX’s West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Base in California.
SpaceX confirmed the successful separation of all 23 Starlink satellites just over an hour after launch. The mission brings the total number of Starlink satellites launched to 6,895.
The Falcon 9 first-stage rocket for Starlink mission 10-7, tail number B1073, had previously launched ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander, the Bandwagon-1 flightshare, and 11 Starlink missions. It successfully landed on SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ approximately eight and a half minutes after launch. It was the 79th landing of a rocket on this particular uncrewed spacecraft, and the 337th for a rocket to date.
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