SpaceX launches first 60 Starlink satellites for fast internet

SpaceX has successfully launched the first 60 Starlink satellites into orbit. The launch of the space company’s fully loaded Falcon 9 rocket took place on the night of Thursday to Friday from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX has now announced that the sixty satellites successfully placed in Earth orbit. According to Elon Musk, the director of SpaceX, all sixty Starlink satellites are online and the solar panels will be deployed soon. The satellites were very closely spaced and stacked in the nose cone of the Falcon 9 rocket, launched twice before. Incidentally, the first stage of the rocket landed successfully at sea; that is the fortieth time such a booster has been captured.

The satellites were released last night at an altitude of about 440km above Earth, after which they eventually climb to 550km using their own rockets. Each satellite weighs 227kg and the total weight is the heaviest payload ever launched from a Falcon 9 rocket, according to SpaceX. Leaving the rocket was done in a special way, using no spring mechanisms. The Falcon 9’s upper rocket stage rotated so that the satellites are placed in space due to their inertia. According to Musk, this can more or less be regarded as handing out a stack of cards on the table.

These are the first sixty satellites to be part of a network of eventually 12,000 satellites, which should provide access to fast and affordable internet everywhere on earth. They are indeed operational satellites, but they differ slightly from the regular, mass-produced ones that will soon form the network. For example, they cannot communicate directly with each other; to prevent them from colliding, signals still have to be sent to a ground station on Earth. The sixty pieces are actually still a kind of test satellites that are used, for example, to see how such satellites can be placed in orbit around the earth as safely as possible.