SpaceX has damaged its rocket reuse file once more, notching a pleasant spherical quantity within the course of.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Aug. 28) at 4:12 a.m. EDT (0812 GMT), carrying 28 of SpaceX’s Starlink web satellites towards low Earth orbit (LEO).
It was the thirtieth liftoff for this Falcon 9’s first stage, which carries the designation 1067. The booster aced its thirtieth touchdown as properly, coming down at sea on the SpaceX drone ship named “A Shortfall of Gravitas” about 8.5 minutes after launch on Thursday as planned.
Previous Booster 1067 missions
Such extensive reuse is a core part of SpaceX’s vision to make spaceflight cheaper and more efficient. And the company aims to take reuse to even greater levels with its next vehicle, a giant rocket-spaceship combo called Starship.
Each first stage of Starship, which SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, could theoretically launch, land and fly again in less than an hour, company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.
If all goes according to plan on Thursday’s flight, the Falcon 9’s upper stage, which is expendable, will deliver the 28 Starlink satellites to LEO about 64 minutes after launch.
They’ll join the biggest satellite network ever assembled; Starlink currently consists of more than 8,200 operational spacecraft and is rising on a regular basis, as Thursday’s launch reveals.
Booster 1067’s earlier flight was memorable as properly, and never simply because it set a (just-broken) reuse mark. That twenty ninth mission — a Starlink launch that happened on July 2 — was additionally the five hundredth Falcon 9 flight up to now.