SpaceX launched its newest Falcon 9 shortly after midnight on Sunday, including 23 extra Starlink satellites to its rising 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 House Power Station occurred at 12:12:30 a.m. EST (0512:30 UTC).

SapceX confirmed the 23 satellites had been deployed efficiently just a little over an hour after launch. Monitoring knowledge confirmed the satellites had been in a roughly 293×286 km orbit, inclined at 43 levels to the equator.

Slightly greater 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 touchdown on ASOG and the 381st booster touchdown thus far. The primary stage for this mission was flying for a second time after beforehand serving as one of many two Falcon Heavy facet boosters on the GOES-U mission. The tail numbers of the boosters that flew that mission for NOAA and NASA within the June this 12 months had been B1072 or B1086, SpaceX didn’t differentiate which of these flew on Sunday.

With the latest launch of DTC Starlink satellites from Vandenberg House Power Base on Dec. 5, SpaceX introduced that it accomplished its first orbital shell for that a part of the constellation. As of that payload deployment, SpaceX had launched 362 DTC Starlink satellites.

The primary Starlink satellite tv for pc direct to mobile phone constellation is now full.

This may allow unmodified cellphones to have Web connectivity in distant areas.

Bandwidth per beam is just ~10Mb, however future constellations will likely be way more succesful.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2024