This week was yet another Starlink launch, but this one was slightly different. On May 15 at 22:54 UTC, Starlink L26 launched from LC-39A at the KSC. Instead of the usual complement of 60 Starlink satellites, Booster 1058 only carried 52 Starlink along with two rideshare payloads as part of its eighth flight. Rideshares are paying customers piggybacking a ride to a similar orbit as the Starlink.

After 98 minutes of coasting and two burns of the second stage, all 54 satellites were successfully deployed into orbit. This brought the number of Starlink satellites launched to 1,677.

The second stage put the payloads into a 566-by-584-kilometer orbit inclined at 53 degrees. This is about twenty kilometers above the operational constellation because the rideshare payloads needed a higher insertion orbit. Instead of raising their orbits, the 52 Starlink will have to lower them to become operational.

One of the rideshare payloads was a 112-kilogram (66 two-liter soda bottle) Capella Space synthetic-aperture radar satellite, while the other was Tyvak 0130, a CubeSat designed to do astronomy in optical wavelengths. Tyvak-0130 is a 6U 11-kilogram spacecraft, about the size and weight of a briefcase. It has a unique telescope system: one piece of glass with reflective coatings on both ends. According to the engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab who build the telescope, the “telescope design does not require precise alignment between two separate mirrors to ensure proper focusing, simplifying the design and allowing a smaller, less expensive spacecraft to carry the monolithic telescope.” Tyvak-130 is capable of monochrome or color imaging for Earth observation, astronomy, and space situational awareness.

For those of you keeping score at home, Booster 1058 successfully landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You stationed downrange in the Atlantic.  Both fairings were on their second flights, one having flown on the SXM-7 mission and the other on NROL-108. Only one fairing was recovered from the water.

More Information

SpaceX info page (Archive.org)

PDF: Starlink application (FCC)

Tyvak smallsat launched by SpaceX to validate miniature space debris telescope (Spaceflight Now)

Launch video