A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will fly its record-breaking 12th space mission on Friday (May 6), and you can watch the event live.
two stages Falcon 9 It topped with 53 SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites and is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday at 5:42 a.m. EDT (0942 GMT). Watch it here on SpaceX.com when the time is right, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly through the company.
This will be the 12th launch of the first stage of the Falcon 9, with a record for company reuse. And the craft will fly again after Friday, if all goes according to plan; SpaceX Aiming to land the booster missile again, aboard his unmanned ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which will be stationed off the coast of Florida.
Related: Starlink megaconstellation from SpaceX is launched in pictures
starlink SpaceX is the huge and growing constellation of broadband satellites. The company launched More than 2,400 Starlink spacecraft So far, many of them this year; 10 of 17 SpaceX launches in 2022 were dedicated Starlink missions.
There will be more such trips to come. The next generation version of Starlink – which already offers internet service to a variety of locations around the world – could consist of Up to 30,000 satellitesaccording to paperwork provided by SpaceX.
As the Falcon 9 launch tally shows, 2022 was indeed a big year for SpaceX. The past month has been particularly busy; The company launched six missions in April, including ax 1the first fully private crewed flight to the International Space Station, and Crew-4, the latest flight by SpaceX astronauts to NASA’s orbiting laboratory.
Ax-1 returned to Earth after 15 days of stay aboard the station, but Crew 4 It’ll stay there for about six months — about the same as the Crew-3, which launched in November 2021 and is scheduled to blast off the Florida coast early Friday morning.
Mike Wall is the author of “AbroadBook (Great Grand Publishing House, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrials. Follow him on Twitter Tweet embed. Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed or on Facebook.
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