SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink satellites into orbit

May 5, 2021 Ava

SpaceX launched a new batch of Starlinks Tuesday using a recycled Falcon 9 rocket to ferry the internet satellites to space.

The rocket took off at 3:01pm ET from Pad 39A at NASA‘s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida as blue skies covered the area.

Ascent weather at the launch pad and recovery weather over the drone ship were ‘fantastic’ for take-off and landing, the SpaceX host of the livestream said minutes before the rocket launched.

The flight, called Starlink 25, is the 13th mission of 2021 for the Elon Musk-owned firm and the third time this Falcon 9 rocket has ventured into space.

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The Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine Merlin engines just before take-off that sent a massive white cloud blowing from the base, and then it headed off to space.

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After delivery the batch of 60 Starlinks into orbit, the rocket’s first stage made a safe landing on the ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Musk, a Star Wars fan, named SpaceX’s Falcon 9 after the Millennium Falcon from the popular film.

SpaceX has held a number of Starlink launches each month this year, as part of Musk’s masterplan to have a total of 1,500 Starlink devices orbiting Earth by the end of 2021, along with funding his long-held dream of going to Mars.

SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell said during a recent interview: ‘The total addressable market for launch, with a conservative outlook on commercial human passengers, is probably about $6 billion, but the addressable market for global broadband is $1 trillion.’

‘The total addressable market for launch, with a conservative outlook on commercial human passengers, is probably about $6 billion,’ she said, ‘but the addressable market for global broadband is $1 trillion.’

According to Tesmanian, if SpaceX obtains 25 million Starlink subscribers, it would generate about $30 billion every year.

This is 10 times more than what the company earns as a launch provider, it added.

More than 10,000 users are connected to the Starlink satellite internet, according to a SpaceX filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from February.

The document said the service is ‘meeting and exceeding 100/20 megabits per second (Mbps) throughout individual users’ and many are seeing latency ‘at or below 31 milliseconds.’

There are some drawbacks for users, however – as well as the hefty cost, there are planned outages due to the limited number of satellites and the fact that Starlink is still in early testing.

The Starlink website reads: ‘There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

‘As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.’

Source: Thanks msn.com