On September 14 at 03:55 UTC, the Starlink Group 2-1 mission launched atop Falcon 9 booster 1049 from SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This was the tenth flight for Booster 1049, which successfully landed on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, making its first catch since being moved to the west coast several months ago. B1049 is only the second Falcon 9 first stage booster to make ten flights.

Both of the fairings were reused, one making its second flight and the other its third. This was the 24th mission to use reused fairings, and the 43rd and 44th reused fairings, according to the webcast. They were successfully fished out of the water by NRC Quest, the west coast fairing retrieval boat. All 51 satellites were successfully deployed into orbit several minutes after launch following a single second stage burn.

SpaceX launched these satellites from Vandenberg because it allowed them to put the satellites into a higher inclination orbit needed to provide coverage at higher latitudes. The tradeoff for this is that more fuel is needed to achieve the higher inclination orbit so the maximum payload is reduced, hence there being only 51 satellites rather than the usual complement of 60. As well, these satellites have been upgraded to include laser communication links, so they are slightly heavier than the previous model of Starlink satellite.

For some reason, probably to mess up our tracking spreadsheet, SpaceX changed the naming scheme used for the first 28 Starlink launches to a different one for the launches in this new shell. These satellites are going into 70-degree inclination orbits at roughly the same altitude as the first 1,678 satellites which went into 53-degree inclination orbits. There will be roughly the same number of satellites in this shell as the first one. While it is technically possible to launch into a 70-degree inclination orbit from Florida with the new southern dogleg trajectory, it is even easier to do this from Vanderberg, so SpaceX can launch satellites for the new shell from both coasts.

More Information

Starlink Group 2-1 mission page (SpaceX via archive)

Launch video