SpaceX reached a new reusability milestone with its Falcon 9 rocket with a Starlink launch from Florida on Friday night. The first booster stage, tail number B1062, fired for a record 21st time, the first in SpaceX’s rocket fleet to do so.
The launch of the Starlink 6-59 mission added 23 more satellites to the growing Internet constellation in low Earth orbit and was the company’s 36th special Starlink launch of the year.
Since making its debut in November 2020, B1062 has launched two GPS satellites, eight astronauts on two missions (Inspiration4 and Ax-1) along with 13 Starlink flights. To date, it has sent 553 payloads into orbit, including the two Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Before its May 17 flight, the latter launched about a month ago on the Starlink 6-49 mission. Like last time, about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1062 landed on the SpaceX unmanned craft, “A Shortfall of Gravitas.” It was the 70th ASOG assisted booster landing and the 309th Falcon 9 booster landing to date.
According to the latest statistics released by orbital tracking expert and astronomer Jonathan McDowell, as of the morning of May 17, there were a total of 6,017 Starlink satellites in orbit and 5,941 in operation.
Prior to the launch of the Starlink 6-59 mission, a total of 6,436 satellites had been launched to LEO, with 788 increasing in 2024.
Development of Starship Flight Four
As SpaceX prepared for Friday night’s Falcon 9 launch, it was also busy in south Texas working on the fourth integrated flight test of its Starship rocket.
The nearly 400-foot-tall rocket was lined up on the launch pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility on Wednesday, May 15. The next day she held a partial wet dress rehearsal where she practiced loading liquid methane and liquid oxygen aboard the vehicle.
A launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowing the vehicle’s next flight test is still pending, but in a May 11 response on X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX founder Elon Musk suggested that the launch is “probably three until five weeks from now.
At an event hosted by the Harlingen Economic Development Corporation on May 14, Kathy Leuders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase, said they are working to obtain a license by the end of May or early June.
“We will be ready as always. We’ll get the vehicle sorted and the first day we get that license we’ll be flying,” Leuders said.
She also noted in her talk that they also started testing Starship rockets after the fourth flight. In response to a question from the audience, she referred to a problem on Ship 31 captured by LabPadre’s cameras, which showed a pulsating flash coming from the rocket.
“We were testing our next round of vehicles, the next round of Starships, and we had a test anomaly that we’re currently evaluating and figuring out what that means,” Leaders said. “We’re always working on vehicles, but when there’s a problem with a vehicle that’s in the stream, you want to make sure you can isolate the cause of that problem from your vehicle. So what the teams are doing right now is really going in and saying is this the same design? Is there any other reason to have separation to make sure we don’t go into a flight test with a problem.”
Although SpaceX has not commented further on the anomaly, moving forward with the wet dress rehearsal on May 16, they have likely either fixed the problem or feel reassured that it will not affect Ship 29, which is in use on IFT-4.
