Update Sept. 5, 9:40 a.m. EDT: SpaceX confirms deployment of the 28 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX completed its 500th recovery of a Falcon booster during a Friday morning flight supporting its Starlink satellite constellation. The Falcon 9 rocket roared away from Launch Complex 39A at 8:32 a.m. EDT (1232 UTC).
The Starlink 10-57 mission flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with the rocket soaring past and through the clouds over Florida’s Space Coast. Nearly 8.5 minutes after takeoff, the Falcon 9 booster supporting this mission, tail number 1069, safely landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions’ (JRTI), off the coast of South Carolina.
For the launch window, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 70 percent chance for favorable weather. Meteorologists were tracking the potential interference from cumulus clouds, but that proved to not be a showstopper for the launch.
“Deep atmospheric moisture combined with a stalled boundary across South Florida will locally result in periodic onshore-moving showers over the next few days,” launch weather officers wrote on Thursday. “The timing and extent of these showers at any given time remains ambiguous, however the pattern is unlikely to support organized convection during the morning hours aside from over the Atlantic waters.”
B1069 launched this mission on its 27th trip to space and back. Some of its previous missions include CRS-24, Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F satellite and 22 batches of Starlink satellites.
It’s landing on JRTI was the 135th recovery for this vessel. It was last used during Sunday’s Starlink 10-14 mission on its 30th mission supporting a booster landing this year.
SpaceX uses one other droneship on the East Coast, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ which was making its way back to Port Canaveral in Brevard County after supporting the Starlink 10-22 mission on Wednesday.
SpaceX is aiming for at least 170 launches using its Falcon rockets by the end of the year. Friday’s launch will be number 111.
source: spaceflightnow.com