SpaceX concluded its first mission of the year a few days ago, but it remains unstoppable and has just continued the expansion of the Starlink network, which takes internet via satellite to various regions of the world. The American manufacturer took 53 new units to Earth orbit using the Falcon 9, marking the 200th flight of the rocket.
The takeoff took place last Thursday (02) at 4:58 am (Brasília time) at one of the stations at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, located in Florida, United States. The company shared the takeoff video and beautiful photographs of the entire mission process on its official Twitter profile. Check out:
The rocket stages separated after about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The first stage landed at one of SpaceX’s marine facilities after 9 minutes, while the segment contained all the satellites on a journey that lasted around an hour.
Released in a region reserved for the second generation of Starlink satellites, the new units have automatic configuration, so they opened their solar panels as soon as they separated from the spacecraft and used their ion thrusters to navigate to their operational orbit at about 529 kilometers of altitude.
Considering the 53 new satellites launched on Thursday (02), SpaceX took a total of 3,875 satellites from the Starlink constellation to Earth’s orbit, and the expectation is that thousands of other new generation units – bigger, faster and capable to connect directly to mobile devices—be installed in the coming years.