SpaceX launched 28 more Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit from Florida on Saturday morning, just days after the space-based internet provider briefly went down.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 5:01 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Pad 40.
The rocket's first stage was used for the 22nd time, including the Crew-6 missions and 17 previous Starlink launches.
About eight minutes after liftoff, the booster landed on the unmanned spacecraft, A Shortfall of Gravitas, in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the 119th landing of the drone ship and the 480th landing for SpaceX in Florida and California.
This was the 91st Falcon 9 launch this year, according to SpaceFlight Now.
As astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted, there are currently more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Starlink users experienced a rare, complete internet outage on Thursday. The outage began at 4 p.m. About 2.5 hours later, SpaceX reported that most of the internet connection had been restored. Another hour and a half later, Starlink said the internet was fully restored.
“The issue was caused by a failure in key internal software services that manage the core network,” Michael Nichols, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, wrote on Platform X. “We apologize for the temporary inconvenience to our network; we are committed to ensuring high network reliability and addressing the root cause of this issue to prevent it from happening again.”
Since its launch in 2021, Starlink has more than 6 million customers worldwide, 2 million of which are in the United States.
SpaceX's next launch is scheduled for Saturday at 8:55 p.m. PT from Pad 4E at the Vandenbrugh Space Station in California. That launch will include 24 more Starlink satellites.
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