For the second time this week, SpaceX is pushing the envelope by flying a Falcon 9 rocket for a 16th time. Booster 1060 is now scheduled to liftoff from Cape Canaveral’s pad 40 at 11:50 p.m. EDT (0350 UTC) Saturday carrying 54 Starlink satellites into orbit. Just last Sunday, Booster 1058 launched 22 second-generation Starlink satellites, becoming the first Falcon 9 rocket to make a 16th flight. Previously, the reusable Falcon 9 first stage booster had only been certified for 15 missions.
It will be the second launch attempt for this mission after an unspecified problem caused a launch scrub during the final minute of the countdown early Friday morning. SpaceX pushed back the next launch attempt by a day and conducted a static test fire early Saturday morning to clear the rocket for flight tonight.
During the test the Falcon 9’s nine Merlin engines ignited at 12:50 a.m. EDT (0450 UTC) and fired for about ten seconds while the rocket was held down on the launch pad. SpaceX did not provide an update on the outcome of the test but presumably all went well as the company proceeded towards another launch attempt.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number 1060, previously launched GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, Transporter-6, and 10 Starlink missions. It will be only the second booster to have flown 16 times, following close of the heels of Booster 1058’s launch of 22 second-generation Starlink satellites. It will be only the second booster to have flown 16 times, following close of the heels of Booster 1058’s July 9 launch of 22 second-generation Starlink satellites.
This mission, designated Starlink 5-15 will loft the last 54 older-generation Starlink V1.5 satellites. Earlier this year SpaceX started placing a new generation of Starlink satellites in orbit, known as Starlink V2 Minis, which are larger and offer four times the broadband capacity of the older-design satellites.
The Starlink network provides high-speed, low-latency connectivity to customers around the world. SpaceX says each Starlink launch adds more than a terabit per second of capacity to the constellation.
SpaceX currently has 4397 functioning Starlink satellites in space, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell, an expert tracker of spaceflight activity and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
If all goes according to plan, the first-stage booster will land on the drone ship ‘A Short Fall of Gravitas’ in the Atlantic Ocean about eight and a half minutes after launch. The 54 Starlink satellites will be deployed just over an hour after launch.