13 Hand Rockets! SpaceX Falcon 9 sets a new record for a single repeat launch, putting 53 Starlink satellites into orbit

On Friday, June 18, local time in the United States, SpaceX used a 12-recovery Falcon 9 rocket to send 53 Starlink satellites into orbit, making it the company’s most-flyed launch vehicle to date.Created the latest record for repeated launches of a single rocket.

The rocket blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 12:09 ET Friday, with 53 satellites scheduled to be deployed to low-Earth orbit about 15.5 minutes after launch. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket (B1060 booster) landed on a SpaceX unmanned recovery ship moored in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.

This is this Falcon 9 rocket13th launch and landing, setting a new record for the reuse of a SpaceX launch vehicle. It is reported that the rocket has performed three commercial missions before, including the launch of the GPS III SV03 satellite, the Turkish communication satellite Turksat 5A, and the micro-satellite carpooling mission Transporter 2. In addition, it has also launched nine batches of Starlink satellites, which will weigh about 160 tons in two years. satellite into orbit.

The payload of SpaceX’s launch this time is 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites, with a total weight of about 16 tons. The satellites are slightly larger than previous versions and don’t have “shading mirrors” designed to reduce reflected light that could interfere with astronomical observations, as it would interfere with the laser links between the satellites. Even so, the new Starlink satellites reflect less sunlight than the earliest versions, and are designed to minimize the impact of the expanding network on observations by optical and radio telescopes.

Starlink, SpaceX’s space-based satellite internet project, has now launched More than 2700 piecesMicrosatellites are in orbit, and that number is increasing rapidly over time, with a second-generation network that could eventually consist of as many as 30,000 satellites.

What’s more, the launch is the first since SpaceX’s first use of a recovered Falcon rocket booster in March 2017.100th launch, marking the company’s 50th consecutive successful rocket recovery and the 130th consecutive successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket. The previous record was set by the Russian Soyuz/R-7 rocket combination, which successfully launched 133 times in a row.

For SpaceX and its founder and CEO Elon Musk, enabling the mass reuse of launch vehicles is critical. Musk has said many times that the ability to quickly and completely repeat the launch is the key breakthrough that will allow humans to settle on Mars and achieve a variety of other ambitious spaceflight feats.

Friday’s launch is the first of three missions SpaceX plans to fly from three different launch pads over three days, and the company also intends to launch Sarah-1 for the German military on Saturday morning ET (June 18). radar satellite, and launched a commercial communications satellite early Sunday (June 19).

If the plan goes well, SpaceX will complete three orbital launches in 36 hours and 19 minutes, just 10 hours apart from the Starlink satellite launch and the Sarah-1 launch. In addition, SpaceX is tentatively scheduled to perform two other missions in June, the launch of the communications satellite SES-22 on June 28, and the launch of the Starlink satellite again at the end of the month.

So far this year, SpaceX has launched 24 missions, 15 of which have been used to launch Starlink satellites.