File photo: a SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands on its launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: SpaceX
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for launch tonight carrying the first batch of second-generation Starlink satellites to be lofted from the West Coast. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California is scheduled for 9:34 p.m. PDT (12:34 a.m. EDT / 0434 UTC July 19).
The Falcon 9 will be carrying 15 satellites of the Starlink V2 mini design, significantly less than the 21-22 satellites that can be launched into the same orbit from Cape Canaveral. The rocket must skirt islands off the California coast, requiring a turn after stage separation to get on the correct trajectory for its planned 43-degree inclination orbit. This maneuver known as a ‘dogleg’ burns additional propellant and reduces the Falcon 9’s lift capacity. This new Starlink version weighs nearly three times more than the previous V1.5 spacecraft.
The booster, which is making its 10th flight, will touch down about eight and a half minutes after launch on the drone ship ‘Of Course I Still Love You’, which will be stationed about 410 miles (660km) downrange from Vandenberg in the Pacific Ocean. The first stage booster previously launched the NROL-87, NROL-85, SARah-1, SWOT and Transporter-8 missions. It has also made four Starlink delivery flights.
The Merlin vacuum engine on the second stage will perform a single 6 minute burn to place the stack of Starlink satellites into a 196 by 160 mile (315 by 258 km) orbit. The satellites will be deployed from the upper stage payload adapter 14 minutes 51 seconds into flight.
The V2 mini satellites will use an argon-fueled propulsion system to maneuver into their operational orbits.
This next generation of Starlink satellites is equipped with two large solar panels and improved phased array antennas, capable of four times the communications capacity of earlier Starlinks. This will be the sixth launch of V2 mini satellites. The last batch of the V1.5 satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral on Saturday.
In early May, SpaceX announced it had 1.5 million subscribers worldwide to its Starlink network which offers low latency, high speed Internet service worldwide.
To date, SpaceX has launched a total of 4,822 Starlink satellites of which 4,485 remain in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who maintains a database of space flight operations.