SpaceX launches 475th Falcon 9 rocket to date on afternoon Starlink flight

SpaceX returned to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Wednesday afternoon with its Falcon 9 rocket. The company launched of its latest batch of Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on the 475th Falcon 9 rocket to date.

The Starlink 6-67 mission added 28 more spacecraft to the more than 7,400 currently in low Earth orbit. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex happened at 12:38 p.m. (1638 UTC).

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an idilic outlook for the launch window. Meteorologists anticipated a 95 percent chance of favorable weather during ascent, a marked improvement from SpaceX’s recent spate of overnight flights.

“High pressure will build in from the west through the rest of the week,” launch weather officers wrote on Tuesday. “The ridge will create more benign weather across the Spaceport, with only a very small chance of a Cumulus Cloud Rule violation during the primary launch opportunity.”

SpaceX used Falcon 9 booster 1090 to launch the Starlink 6-67 mission. It’s previous three flights were NASA’s Crew-10, the Bandwagon-3 rideshare and SES’s O3b mPOWER 7 and 8 satellites.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, landed on the droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ which was positioned in the Atlantic Ocean to the east of The Bahamas. This marked the 109th booster landing for that droneship and the 447 booster landing to date.