SpaceX launched more than 20 Starlink broadband satellites, including 13 with direct cellular connectivity, from California early Wednesday morning (September 25).
The Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Vandenberg Space Command Center on California’s central coast at 3:01 a.m. EDT on Wednesday (7:01 a.m. GMT, 9:01 p.m. California time on September 24).
The Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth as scheduled 8.5 minutes after launch, landing on SpaceX’s unmanned “Of Course I Still Love You” vehicle over the Pacific Ocean.
This was the booster’s 10th launch and landing. SpaceX Mission Description.
Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 upper stage will continue on its journey to low Earth orbit, where it will deploy 20 satellites 60 minutes after liftoff to join the Starlink mega-constellation of more than 100 satellites. 6,300 active spacecraft.
Related: Starlink satellite train: how to see and track it in the night sky
The Starlink launch was part of a typically busy week for SpaceX, as Elon Musk’s company is scheduled to launch a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) with NASA’s Crew 9 astronauts on board a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Saturday (September 28).
Crew 9 isn’t your typical ISS astronaut mission: It’s launching with a crew of two instead of the usual four, because it’s there to deliver the two astronauts already aboard the ISS, NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, back to Earth, who arrived in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
Starliner experienced thruster problems en route to the ISS, and NASA decided to return the spacecraft uncrewed as a result. Williams and Wilmore are scheduled to return aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom in February 2025 with two other Crew 9 astronauts, Nick Hague of NASA and Alexander Gorbunov of the Russian Space Agency.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 12:30 a.m. ET on September 24 with news that the launch and rocket landing were successful.
