SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral

SpaceX launched its latest Falcon 9 shortly after midnight on Sunday, adding 23 more Starlink satellites to its growing mega-constellation.

The midnight hour launch featured 13 satellites which have Direct to Cell capabilities. Liftoff of the Starlink 12-5 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 12:12:30 a.m. EST (0512:30 UTC).

SapceX confirmed the 23 satellites were deployed successfully a little over an hour after launch. Tracking data confirmed the satellites were in a roughly 293×286 km orbit, inclined at 43 degrees to the equator.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first-stage booster landed on the SpaceX droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ This marked the 89th booster landing on ASOG and the 381st booster landing to date. The first stage for this mission was flying for a second time after previously serving as one of the two Falcon Heavy side boosters on the GOES-U mission. The tail numbers of the boosters that flew that mission for NOAA and NASA in the June this year were B1072 or B1086, SpaceX did not differentiate which of those flew on Sunday.

With the most recent launch of DTC Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Dec. 5, SpaceX announced that it completed its first orbital shell for that part of the constellation. As of that payload deployment, SpaceX had launched 362 DTC Starlink satellites.

The first Starlink satellite direct to cell phone constellation is now complete.

This will enable unmodified cellphones to have Internet connectivity in remote areas.

Bandwidth per beam is only ~10Mb, but future constellations will be much more capable. https://t.co/wJHMGEzzE4

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2024