SpaceX launched 20 more of its Starlink broadband satellites from California on Wednesday morning (Sept. 25), including 13 with direct-to-sale capability.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink spacecraft took off at 3:01 a.m. Eastern time (0701 GMT; 9:01 p.m. California time on Sept. 24) from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's central coast.
As planned, the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth 8.5 minutes after flight, and landed on the SpaceX drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Pacific Ocean.
According to the SpaceX mission description, this was the 10th launch and landing of this particular booster.
Meanwhile, the Falcon 9's upper stage maintains its speed in low Earth orbit, where it is scheduled to deploy 20 satellites 60 minutes after liftoff. The new satellites will join the Starlink megaconstellation, which includes more than 6,300 active spacecraft.
Connected: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky
The Starlink launch was part of a typically busy week for SpaceX. Elon Musk's company aims to launch the Crew-9 astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA on Saturday (Sept. 28), sending it aloft via a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Crew-9 is not your typical ISS astronaut mission. It will launch with two crew members instead of the usual four, as it will carry back to Earth two people already living on the ISS — NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who arrived in June aboard Boeing's Starliner capsule.
Starliner suffered a thruster problem en route to the ISS, and as a result NASA decided to return the spacecraft without a crew. Williams and Wilmore will return home aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” in February 2025 along with two Crew-9 astronauts – Nick Hague of NASA and Alexander Gorbunov of Russia's space agency Roscosmos.
editor's Note: This story was updated on Sept. 24 at 12:30 p.m. ET with news of a successful launch and rocket landing.