Washington. December 3. INTERFAX - The reusable first stage of the American Falcon 9 launch vehicle, launched on Friday Moscow time with 48 Internet satellites of the Starlink project, made a successful controlled landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, the developer company SpaceX reported.
The vertical landing on the sea platform-drone A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was located in the Atlantic about 640 km from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome, was carried out nine minutes after the launch of the rocket.
As an accompanying payload, the Falcon 9 rocket will also put into orbit two new geospatial-intelligence satellites of the American company BlackSky, which, among other things, will perform tasks in the interests of the Pentagon and the US intelligence services.
The launch was carried out on Thursday at 18:12 East Coast time (Friday at 02:12 Moscow time) from the 40th complex at the Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome in Florida.
This first reusable stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle was used for launches for the second time.
This was the 33rd launch of a group of Internet satellites into orbit since May 2019 as part of the Starlink project and the 17th this year. The previous batch of 53 Starlink satellites was launched on November 13. The SpaceX orbital grouping already consists of 1,842 spacecraft.
Currently, the company is the largest satellite operator in the world.
