Watch Spacex Rocket Launch On Record Setting 14Th Flight On September 10

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will take off for a record 14th time on Saturday night (September 10), launching 34 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites and a massive smartphone connectivity test spacecraft directly into orbit, and you can watch it live. The two stage Hawk 9, atop the Starlinks test satellite and AST SpaceMobile Blue Walker 3, is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Saturday at 9:20 p.m. EDT (0120 GMT on September 11). Watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX or directly through the company (opens in a new tab). The launch will be the 14th for the Falcon 9’s specific first stage, setting a new rocket reuse record. According to a SpaceX mission description (opens in new tab), the booster also helped launch SpaceX’s first astronaut mission, the Demo-2 flight to the International Space Station (ISS), in May 2020. the ANASIS-II satellite for the South Korean military on July 2020; the CRS-21 robotic cargo mission to the ISS in December 2020; the Transporter-1 and Transporter 3 shared-use flights in January 2021 and January 2022, respectively; and eight Starlink missions. The Falcon 9 first stage will return to Earth for another landing on Saturday night. He will score an accurate touchdown at the top SpaceX‘s A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship in the Atlantic Ocean 8.5 minutes after liftoff, if all goes according to plan. The rocket’s upper stage, meanwhile, will continue to power its trajectory. It is scheduled to deploy Blue Walker 3 just under 50 minutes after liftoff and the 34 Starlinks one hour and 14 minutes later. Doing all of this will require five engine burns — more than any other Falcon 9 mission, according to the SpaceX mission description. “One of our most complex missions,” the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk he said via Twitter on Friday (opens in new tab) (September 9). Starlink is SpaceX’s broadband constellation, which already provides service to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The company has launched more than 3,200 Starlink satellites to date and plans to build many more. has permission to put 12,000 Starlink craft into orbit and has applied for permission for up to 30,000 additional satellites. Indeed, another batch of Starlinks will lift off this weekend, if all goes according to plan: A Falcon 9 carrying 54 Starlinks is scheduled to lift off late Sunday night from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, located next to KSC . Late last month, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced an agreement with T-Mobile to provide connectivity directly with smartphones using Starlink Version 2 satellites, a larger and more powerful variant scheduled for release next year. Saturday night’s launch will feature a vessel with similar ambitions in the Blue Walker 3. BlueWalker 3 is a test satellite to be operated by Texas-based AST SpaceMobile, which plans to build its own space-based cellular broadband network.

Artist’s rendering of AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 mobile service satellite in orbit. (Image credit: Nokia/AST SpaceMobile) “We’re pleased to see the industry’s excitement around the satellite-to-phone connectivity model we’ve been building for more than five years,” said Scott Wisniewski, chief strategy officer at AST SpaceMobile, in an emailed statement.
“The upcoming launch of the BlueWalker 3 test satellite will be an important validation of this large and growing global market opportunity,” he added. BlueWalker 3 will feature a phased-array antenna covering 693 square feet (64 square meters) — the largest commercial communications array ever deployed in low Earth orbit, AST SpaceMobile representatives said in an emailed statement. The satellite may be brighter than anything in our night sky except the moon, New Scientist reported (opens in a new tab). SpaceX has launched 40 orbital missions in 2022 so far. Twenty-six of these have been devoted primarily to building the Starlink megaconstellation. Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or enabled Facebook (opens in a new tab).