Update Oct. 22, 11:30 a.m. EDT (1533 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the 28 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched its 550th Falcon 9 mission since the rocket’s debut in 2010. The launch from California added 28 more broadband internet satellites to the company’s Starlink constellation.
Liftoff from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base happened at 7:16 a.m. PDT (10:16 a.m. EDT / 1416 UTC).
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number B1075. This was its 21st flight following the launches of missions like Transporter-11, SARah-2 and SDA-0A.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after launch, B1075 performed an autonomous landing on the SpaceX drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 159th landing on this vessel and the 522nd booster landing to date.
The 28 Starlink V2 Mini satellites was deployed from the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage about an hour after liftoff. The company recently launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite and of those, more than 8,600 are still in low Earth orbit. The Starlink 11-5 mission was the 95th mission in 2025 supporting the low Earth orbit internet constellation.
First Appeared on
Source link
