Washington. November 25. INTERFAX-the Falcon 9 Heavy launch vehicle successfully launched a new batch of 60 mini-satellites into low-earth orbit on Wednesday morning Moscow time, designed to continue deploying the global Internet coverage of the Starlink system, the developer company SpaceX said.
"The withdrawal of 60 Starlink satellites has been confirmed," the report said.
This is the 16th launch of a group of Internet satellites, starting in may last year, as part of the Starlink project. The previous batch of 60 Starlink satellites was launched on October 24. Taking into account the current satellites, the SpaceX orbital group already consists of 953 Starlink spacecraft. The company is currently the largest satellite operator in the world.
The launch was carried out on November 24 at 21: 13 East coast time (November 25 at 05: 13 Moscow time) from the 40th launch complex at the NASA spaceport at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
14 minutes and 46 seconds after the launch of the rocket, a group of Starlink satellites was launched into the specified orbit.
Meanwhile, the first reusable stage of the SpaceX launch vehicle, which was used for the seventh launch, made a controlled vertical landing 8 minutes 43 seconds after launch on the automatic floating platform Of Course I Still Love You, which was located in the Atlantic about 630 km from the Cape Canaveral space center.
In addition, special rescue sea vessels Ms. Chief and GO Searcher in the Atlantic had to "catch" in surface nets or fish out of the water two flaps of the fairing of the rocket's head, which after separation descended by parachute. Reusing the fairing can save SpaceX up to $6 million when launching its rockets.