SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket finally lifted off on Tuesday, October 6, deploying a fresh batch of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit following two delays. The company successfully recovered the first stage booster and both fairing halves.
Sixty new satellites have now joined SpaceX's expanding Starlink constellation, which aims to deploy at least 12,000 satellites over the coming years to deliver high-speed internet worldwide. This mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida brings the total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to 773.
As Elon Musk has noted, service rollout can begin once 500 to 800 satellites are operational. SpaceX teams are already testing Starlink user terminals—compact devices about the size of a laptop—gathering latency data and running speed tests.
SpaceX engineer Kate Tice reports promising early results: "extremely low latency" and "download speeds exceeding 100 megabits per second." These capabilities support "enough bandwidth to play the fastest online games and stream multiple HD movies simultaneously," she explained. A public beta is anticipated before year-end.
This was SpaceX's 16th mission of fiscal year 2020. Only China leads globally, with about 30 launches this year (four failures).
The Falcon 9 first stage, B1058, touched down successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean about 8 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff. This marked its third flight: first on NASA's Demo-2 crew mission to the ISS in May, then launching a South Korean military communications satellite weeks prior.
SpaceX also recovered both fairing halves—the protective nose cone housing the satellites. Each half, valued at roughly $6 million, uses guided software and parachutes for precise ocean recovery.
One fairing half had flown twice before, on Starlink missions in May 2019 and March 2020.
The launch followed recent scrubs: a GPS 3 mission aborted two seconds before liftoff on October 2 due to an "unexpected pressure increase in the turbopump gas generator," per Musk's tweet. The Starlink mission itself was halted 18 seconds prior on October 4 (sensor issue) and again two seconds before on October 5.
Frustrated by these setbacks, Musk announced a "broad review" of launch operations to boost cadence. He's visiting SpaceX's Florida sites at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center this week.
Musk targets at least 22 launches in 2020 and 48 in 2021. As CEO and chief engineer, he'll leverage his deep expertise to refine processes and meet these goals.
