Live coverage: SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch Starlink satellites from California

SpaceX is planning its 42nd Starlink delivery mission of the year with a Falcon 9 scheduled to launch from the West Coast carrying a batch of 21 satellites at 1:48 a.m. PDT (4:48 a.m. EDT / 0848 UTC) Monday morning.

We’ll bring you live coverage of the Starlink launch in our Launch Pad Live stream.

The Falcon 9 will head in a south-easterly direction after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California targeting a 185×178 mile (297×286 km) orbit, inclined at 53 degrees to the equator.

The first stage booster, making its sixth flight, previously launched the first Tranche 0 mission for the U.S. military’s Space Development Agency and flew four previous Starlink delivery missions. After completing its burn, the first stage will land on the drone ship ‘Of Course I still Love You’ stationed about 400 miles downrange (644km) in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.

File photo of a SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: SpaceX

If all goes according to plan, deployment of the 21 V2 Mini Starlink satellites will occur just over an hour after launch. The V2 Mini model was introduced earlier this year and is much larger than the V1.5 satellites. Equipped with upgraded antennae and larger solar panels, the latest models can deliver four times the bandwidth of the previous satellites.

SpaceX recently announced it had signed up over two million subscribers in more than 60 countries for its Starlink internet service. Since 2019 it has launched 5,157 satellites according to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who maintains a space flight database. Of those satellites 4,807 remain in orbit and 4,776 appear to be working normally.