Washington. January 24. INTERFAX-The Falcon 9 heavy launch vehicle on Sunday successfully launched a record batch of 143 mini-satellites into a given orbit, including 10 spacecraft to continue the deployment of the global Internet coverage of the Starlink system, the developer company SpaceX said.
"The withdrawal of the satellites has been confirmed," the report says.
As part of the Transporter-1 mission, a rocket carrying 133 government and commercial spacecraft, as well as 10 SpaceX Starlink Internet satellites, was launched from the Cape Canaveral space complex in Florida at 10:00 am US East Coast time (18:00 GMT).
The first reusable stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which was used for the fifth time, after separation made a successful controlled vertical landing on the automatic marine platform Of Course I Still Love You droneship, which was located 533 km from the launch pad in the Atlantic.
As reported by Interfax, on January 20, the Falcon 9 heavy launch vehicle launched another batch of 60 mini-satellites designed for the global Internet coverage of the Starlink system into low-Earth orbit. This was the 17th launch of a large group of Internet satellites as part of the Starlink project, starting in May 2019. SpaceX's orbital constellation now consists of more than a thousand Starlink spacecraft.
The company is currently the largest satellite operator in the world.