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Editor’s update for 5:51 pm ET: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 new Starlink satellites suffered a last-second abort while attempting to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 14. A new launch date will be announced when the rocket is again ready, SpaceX has said.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch 22 more of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Friday (June 14) after a series of weather delays.
The Starlink satellites will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a just over three -hour window that opens at 5:07 p.m. EDT (2107 GMT). SpaceX will stream the action live via its account on X, beginning about five minutes before launch. The company has until 8:19 p.m. EDT (0019 GMT) to launch the mission.
SpaceX had planned to launch the mission on Wednesday (June 12) and then again Thursday (June 13), but pushed the try back by another 24 hours due to poor weather conditions. The company also has a backup launch day on Saturday (June 15), if needed.
The Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan, landing on the droneship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
It will be the 16th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. Ten of its 15 flights to date have been Starlink missions. The remaining five missions were commercial flights to loft the SES-22 satellite, ispace’s private Hakuto-R Mission 1 moon lander, the Amazonas-6 communications satellite, CRS-27 cargo mission for NASA and Bandwagon-1 multi-payload rideshare flight, SpaceX said.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, will continue carrying the 22 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, deploying them about 53 minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX has launched 60 orbital missions so far in 2024, which works out to an average of one liftoff every 2.7 days.
Forty-three of these launches have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 6,100 operational spacecraft.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8:30 p.m. ET on June 13 with the new target launch date of June 14.