SpaceX going for new rocket reuse record on 100th Falcon 9 launch - Spaceflight Now

Sixty more Starlink internet satellites are ready to rocket into orbit Sunday night from Cape Canaveral on the 100th flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher, and the seventh flight of SpaceX’s reusable “fleet leader” booster.

The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch at 9:56:21 p.m.

The Falcon 9 launch with the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich oceanography satellite Saturday was SpaceX’s 22nd mission of 2020, breaking the company’s record for the most launches it’s performed in a calendar year.

While the Falcon 9 launch from California flew with a factory-fresh first stage booster, SpaceX’s launch from Florida Sunday night will use a booster that’s flown six times before.

The rocket set for launch Sunday — known as B1049 — debuted in September 2018 with the launch of the Telstar 18 VANTAGE  geostationary communications satellite from Cape Canaveral.

The booster flew again in May 2019 with SpaceX’s first set of 60 Starlink internet satellites, followed by three more Starlink missions on Jan.

The launch team originally planned to test-fire the rocket early Friday ahead of a potential launch attempt Saturday night, but SpaceX aborted the test in the final moments before ignition.

Heading northeast from Cape Canaveral, the rocket’s first stage booster will separate about two-and-a-half minutes into the mission, targeting a landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” around 400 miles (650 kilometers) northeast of the launch site.

The quarter-ton satellites, built by SpaceX in Redmond, Washington, are expected to unfurl power-generating solar arrays and prime their krypton ion thrusters to begin raising their orbits to an operational altitude of 341 miles (550 kilometers), where they will join more than 800 other Starlink relay stations to beam broadband internet signals across most of the populated world.

With the launch Sunday, SpaceX will have deployed 955 Starlink satellites into orbit since May 2019.

Crew-rated SpaceX booster returns to Cape Canaveral with a lean