SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, perched atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, took off from Cape Canaveral on May 30, carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station on a NASA mission.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 will blast off from Florida this Saturday, just two weeks after another of the company’s workhorse rockets sent NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station in the historic Demo-2 mission.
The company followed up its first launch of humans just a few days later, with a launch of Starlink satellites, and now it will perform its first Starlink ride-share, carrying 58 of its own broadband satellites along with three Earth observing spacecraft for Planet Labs.
The mission will bring the total number of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit to more than 500 while increasing Planet’s SkySat fleet to 18. SpaceX’s Starlink aims to eventually include tens of thousands of orbiting routers that’ll blanket the Earth in broadband internet access, while the SkySats will help Planet Labs develop imagery of the Earth’s surface.
Making room for the ride-share means this’ll be the first batch of Starlink satellites to include less than 60.
SpaceX said on Twitter that the launch had been moved from Friday to Saturday at 2:21 a.m. PT (5:21 a.m. ET).
The Falcon 9 first stage that’ll be used has previously flown twice, both times on Dragon cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.
Once the live feed of the launch becomes available, we’ll embed it here. The stream typically begins about 15 minutes before launch.