On March 14 at 11:01 UTC, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lofted another sixty Starlink satellites to orbit for the Starlink L-21 mission from LC-39 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the ninth mission for Booster 1051 — a new record for SpaceX. Like the other Starlink launch, the fairings had both previously flown, in this case on the Transporter-1 mission back in January of this year.

All sixty satellites were deployed into orbit successfully. Booster 1051 made its ninth landing on the barge Of Course I Still Love You. Both fairings were recovered from the water by GO Searcher and GO Quest.

To accommodate the rapid launch cadence, the GO “twins” dropped off the fairings from L-20 in a port in North Carolina so it could head back out to the landing zone for L-21. Another ship transported L-20’s fairings from North Carolina back to the Cape. After recovering L-21’s fairings, GO Searcher and GO Quest headed directly to Port Canaveral after recovering the fairings, arriving before Of Course I Still Love You and B1051 in the afternoon of March 16th. We have a photo of this event thanks to DrWD40, who went out to stream the return in Florida. Thanks for letting us use the image.

By our team’s tally, 1,263 Starlink version 1.0 satellites have been deployed so far, which is approximately 88% of the first phase. Three more Starlink launches, or 180 satellites, should complete the first shell of the constellation. With the current rate of launches, the CosmoQuest team expects this to happen as soon as April or May of this year, though because space is hard, it might mean June. We would add one caveat: a certain number of Starlinks fail for various reasons, so an additional launch may be needed to top numbers off. Because the satellites have finite and relatively short lifespans, it will be necessary to periodically add new satellites to the constellation as older ones are decommissioned.

For us, that means more launches to watch.

More Information

SpaceX announcement (archive)

Reddit thread

Launch video