SpaceX Just Launched the First 60 Satellites for Starlink. What About Space Junk?
On Thursday, May 23rd, 2019, SpaceX launched one of its most important payloads in the history of the company - 60 satellites that will begin the constellation of their Starlink internet satellite system.
There were several delays leading up to the launch. It was originally supposed to launch on May 15th, but high upper-level winds scrubbed it. Then the launch was pushed back a week because they needed to upgrade the software on all 60 satellites.
But finally, on Thursday, the rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 10:30 pm Eastern Time from the Space Launch Complex 40 pad.
This launch was the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever put into a Falcon rocket - 18.5 tonnes, not even a Falcon Heavy has flown this much mass. Furthermore, the launch was made on a booster that has already flown to space two times. This is a thrice flown rocket.
After this mission, the booster landed safely at sea on its floating barge, so maybe it’ll get used many more times to launch many more of these satellites.
At the very end of their live broadcast, SpaceX showed the rack of Starlink satellites drifting away from the upper stage. The inertia of their rotating rack was enough for the satellites to drift away from each other and deploy.
And then a few hours later, Elon Musk announced to Twitter that all 60 satellites were online and were about to deploy their solar arrays.
SpaceX announced on Friday, May 24th that this would be the first of 6 Starlink launches for the year, with even more coming in 2020 to bring a total of 720 satellites in orbit.
Watch the video here:
Comments (1)
And what about Radio Astronomy? As I understand it, ~ 2800 satellites will use the Ka and Ku band. Those bands are used for Very-long-baseline interferometry and spectral line observations.