On Thursday morning, two successful rocket launches took place at Cape Canaveral: one from SpaceX and one from United Launch Alliance.
This year, SpaceX launched its 86th Starlink mission. This launch will launch 28 more Starlink V2 Mini satellites into orbit. There are already 8,400 satellites in orbit.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:39 a.m. ET.
It used a Falcon 9 booster, tail number B1080, which completed the 22nd flight of this mission. Approximately 8.5 minutes after liftoff, it landed on the unmanned spacecraft “A Shortfall of Gravitas.” This was the spacecraft's 126th landing.
A ULA Atlas V rocket launched at 8:09 a.m. ET carrying 27 Kuiper satellites.
Project Kuiper is Amazon's satellite internet project that will eventually deploy approximately 3,200 satellites into low Earth orbit.
Today's launch marks the fifth on this mission, following two Atlas V and two Falcon 9 launches that carried 102 satellites into orbit.
“The mission, dubbed KA-03 and marking Amazon's third launch using a ULA Atlas V rocket, launched 27 more satellites into orbit, bringing the total number of Kuiper spacecraft launched to date to 129,” Amazon said on its mission update page.
Sourse: www.upi.com
