The day after it helped return three astronauts and a cosmonaut to Earth from the International Space Station, SpaceX is preparing its next Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The Starlink 10-8 mission will add another batch of 22 Starlink V2 Mini satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO). With this launch, Florida’s Space Coast will also break its record the for most orbital launches clocked in a calendar year, which was previously 72 in 2023.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) is set for 5:47 p.m. EDT (2147 UTC). Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k68Umo
Coming into the Saturday launch opportunity, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast conditions to be 90 percent favorable for liftoff with dry weather being prevalent during the afternoon.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for this mission, B1069 in the SpaceX fleet, will launch for a 19th time. It previously supported the launches of SpaceX’s 24th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-24) mission to the International Space Station, OneWeb Launch #15 and 14 previous Starlink flights.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1069 is set to land on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ If successful, this will be the 95th landing on JRTI and the 359th booster landing to date.
Starlink 10-8 will also be the company’s 69th dedicated Starlink launch of 2024. According to astronomer and expert orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell, as of Oct. 25, there were a total of 6,494 Starlink satellites in LEO.
On Sept. 26, SpaceX announced it reached more than four million customers across the globe. During a presentation at the Starbase launch and test facilities in April, SpaceX founder Elon Musk noted that Starlink had about 2.7 million customers. It reported crossing the three million threshold a little more than a month later.
Starlink is connecting more than 4M people with high-speed internet across 100+ countries, territories and many other markets.
Thank you to all of our customers around the world! 🛰️🌎❤️ → https://t.co/zR6w4t1qM9 pic.twitter.com/sk7wucihxH
— Starlink (@Starlink) September 26, 2024
