SpaceX knocks out 2 launches from two coasts on Friday
SpaceX had a busy Friday, first with a Starlink launch from California and then a nighttime satellite launch from Cape Canaveral.
With only eight hours and 47 minutes between launches, the Space Coast topper came when a Falcon 9 on the Inmarsat’s I-6 F2 mission lifted off at 10:59 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40.
This is the second of six planned communication satellite launches for the British company Inmarsat. The first came in 2021 with the final coming by 2025.
The booster on this flight flew for the third time with another successful recovery landing on the droneship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
First on Friday, a Falcon 9 lifted off amid blue skies from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 2:12 p.m. EST, sending up another 51 of the growing constellation of internet satellites.
This mission’s first-stage booster made its ninth flight, with the company able to recover it on droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean.
The mission was the 75th Starlink launch overall since the first operational deployment of the satellites in 2019, and this batch marks more than 4,000 Starlinks sent into space, according to statistics tracked by astronomer Jonathan McDowell. The Federal Communications Commission last year upped SpaceX’s license to allow for up to 7,500.
Sending up two launches with 24 hours is nothing new for SpaceX, and the nearly nine-hour turnaround time isn’t a record for the company, which sent up Falcon 9s from Kennedy Space Center and Vandenberg SFB on Oct. 5, 2022, just over seven hours apart.
With both flights and recoveries successful, it marks SpaceX’s 211th successful orbital launch with 173 booster recoveries and 146 reflights of used boosters.
All but seven of those have been Falcon 9 rockets with another five from Falcon Heavy and two successful flights of SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1.
For 2023, the two missions make it 12 in seven weeks during a year that Elon Musk said could see as many as 100 launches from among all of SpaceX’s facilities.
The Canaveral flight was the ninth for the Space Coast in 2023, all from SpaceX during a year that could see as many as 92 launches among all providers, although the majority will be from SpaceX.
The next Space Coast flights are a mid-week Starlink mission from Canaveral, and then the Crew-6 mission from Kennedy Space Center no earlier than next Sunday. That flight will send four passengers in the Crew Dragon Endeavour to the International Space Station. That liftoff is slated for 2:07 a.m.
It would be the first of five planned crew flights from the Space Coast in 2023, with four from SpaceX using Crew Dragons and one from United Launch Alliance sending up Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner with people on board for the first time. That mission carrying just two crew is slated for mid- to late-April.
The other Crew Dragon flights, which fly with four crew, include the private Polaris Dawn orbital mission with billionaire Jared Issacman no earlier than March but likely not until summer, the Axiom Space Ax-2 mission to the ISS that could come as early as May and the Crew-7 flight to the station in the fall. The 22 crew across the five missions would be the most humans flying from the Space Coast since 2009 when the Space Shuttle program saw five flights with as many as seven passengers per launch.