Live coverage: SpaceX aims for 500th Falcon booster landing amid sunrise Starlink mission

SpaceX is poised to conduct its 500th recovery of a Falcon booster during a Friday morning flight supporting its Starlink satellite constellation.

The Starlink 10-57 mission will fly on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Falcon 9 booster supporting this mission, tail number 1069 is expected to touch down on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions’ (JRTI), nearly 8.5 minutes into the flight. 

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A is scheduled for 7:29 a.m. EDT (1129 UTC), roughly half an hour after sunrise. Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.

For the launch window. The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 70 percent chance for favorable weather. Meteorologists are tracking the potential interference from cumulus clouds.

“Deep atmospheric moisture combined with a stalled boundary across South Florida will locally result in periodic onshore-moving showers over the next few days,” launch weather officers wrote. “The timing and extent of these showers at any given time remains ambiguous, however the pattern is unlikely to support organized convection during the morning hours aside from over the Atlantic waters.”

B1069 will launch this mission on its 27th trip to space and back. Some of its previous missions include CRS-24, Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F satellite and 22 batches of Starlink satellites.

It’s landing on JRTI will be the 135th recovery for this vessel, if all goes well. It was last used during Sunday’s Starlink 10-14 mission on its 30th mission supporting a booster landing this year.

SpaceX uses one other droneship on the East Coast, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ which is making its way back to Port Canaveral in Brevard County after supporting the Starlink 10-22 mission on Wednesday.

SpaceX is aiming for at least 170 launches using its Falcon rockets by the end of the year. Friday’s launch will be number 111.