SpaceX is making ready to launch its final mission of the 12 months and you’ll watch it stay.
A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 21 Starlink broadband web satellites, together with 13 with direct-to-cell functionality, is poised to raise off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday (Dec. 30). The 3.5-hour launch window opens at 12 a.m. EST (0500 GMT).
A stay webcast of Monday’s mission will start about 5 minutes previous to liftoff, which you’ll watch on SpaceX’s web site and on the social media community X.
The launch can be SpaceX’s 134th Falcon flight in 2024, surpassing the corporate’s prior 12 months whole by 38 missions. Of this 12 months’s 134 launches, 89 had been dedicated to increasing the Starlink world community (together with this upcoming flight). Monday’s launch can also be SpaceX’s third Falcon 9 launch in three days, following a Starlink mission launched from California and a four-satellite launch for Astranis from the corporate’s different Florida launch pad on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Should all go to plan, the Falcon 9 first stage that launches this mission will return to Earth about 8 minutes after lifting off and land on board the droneship “Just Read the Instructions” stationed within the Atlantic Ocean. The Falcon 9’s higher stage will proceed hauling the 21 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit for his or her deployment.
This would be the sixteenth flight for this explicit first stage booster, in keeping with a mission description posted to SpaceX’s web site. It beforehand was used within the launch of Crew-6, BlueBird-1, USSF-124, mPOWER-B and 11 different Starlink missions.
Starlink is the biggest satellite tv for pc constellation ever deployed — and it is repeatedly rising, as Monday’s launch demonstrates. There are presently greater than 6,850 lively Starlink spacecraft, in keeping with satellite tv for pc tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.
