Early Sunday morning, May 9, Cape Canaveral was lit up as a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off the launch pad at space launch complex 40. It was 2:42 a.m. EDT (11:42 p.m. Saturday PDT) when the engines roared and the Falcon 9 carried 60 Starlink satellites into the sky. This successful launch will bring the total 1321 Starlink communication satellites in a low Earth orbit. This flight will mark a milestone as the first stage of the rocket will make its 10th launch.
"First time a Falcon rocket booster will reach double digits in flights," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter Saturday before launch.
Just under nine minutes after the launch the first stage of the rocket safely landed on the drone barge just read the instructions. The landing not only marked the 10th recovery for this rocket but the 83rd time that SpaceX has successfully recovered the first stage of one of their rockets. The first time this feat was accomplished was when SpaceX made history back in December of 2015.
"SpaceX's first reuse of an orbital class rocket was on the SES-10 mission way back in March of 2017," Spacex supply chain supervisor Michael Andrews said in a live webcast. "We've certainly come a long way since then.”
SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. Founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with the goal of bringing down the cost of space transport and one day colonizing Mars. SpaceX currently owns three launch pads: slc-40 in Cape Canaveral and lc-39a at Kennedy Space Center both on the east coast and slc-42 at Vandenberg, California on the west coast.
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