On Wednesday, April 17 at 5:26 p.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched 23 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A beautiful Florida sky was the perfect backdrop for SpaceX which is one shy of the total number of Space Shuttle missions (this was the 81st flight of a Falcon rocket compared to the 82 total shuttle flights) from the historic launch pad.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 touched down on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ This was the 78th booster landing for JRTI and the 298th landing for SpaceX several days after achieving flight leader status with 20 total launches.
This was the 12th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-5, GPS III Space Vehicle 06, Inmarsat I6-F2, CRS-28, Intelsat G-37, NG-20, a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft on the NG-20 mission to the International Space Station, and now six Starlink missions.
There have been a total of 174 orbital flights from LC-39A. Nine of those were Falcon Heavy rockets with the remaining 72 being Falcon 9 rockets. There were also 11 Saturn 5 launches from this pad.
According to astronomer and orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell, reported that the 23 Starlink satellites added to the 5,809 currently on orbit. SpaceX launched 564 Starlink satellites so far in 2024 and this will be its 26th flight so far this year.
SpaceX launch of Maxar’s WorldView Legion mission a No-Go
The WorldView Legion mission was postponed the day before launch and, with support ship Go Beyond now returned to the Port of Long Beach and the listing removed from the FAA Operations Plan Advisory, could be delayed for some time.
The booster, which had yet to be confirmed, was expected to return to land on the pad at Landing Zone 4 located around 400 meters away from the launch mount.
After stage separation, the Falcon 9 booster will make a land landing (land-to-land-landing) at the Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) at the Vandenberg Space Force Base. WorldView Legion is a planned series of high-resolution earth observation satellites from the US company Maxar Technologies.
