SpaceX is once again taking to the skies. On the morning of February 1, the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk (also owner of Twitter) launched its brand new Falcon 9 into orbit to deploy 53 of its Starlink Internet satellites. The 200th flight of this rocket was carried out from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The liftoff was accomplished using a powerful first stage that the rocket jettisoned at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and that safely landed on SpaceX’s “A Shortfall of Gravitas” drone 6 minutes later. One hour after liftoff, the second stage of the spacecraft successfully deployed the 53 satellites.
What is Falcon 9?
Falcon 9 is one of three launch vehicles in the Falcon family: Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, designed and built by the private aerospace company SpaceX, funded by Elon Musk. The company conducts various types of orbital launches in collaboration with NASA.
Falcon 1, the first model built, was designed to deliver a 1,010 kg payload into orbit at a lower cost than other space launch vehicles. Its eventual successor, Falcon 9, was designed to compete with the Delta family of launchers, as it can lift payloads of up to 8,300 kg into geostationary orbit.
Falcon Heavy, the “heavyweight” of the family, has the first stages of three Falcon 9 launch vehicles joined together to form a single first stage and is designed to carry 53,000 kg to orbit, nearly twice as much as its direct rival, Boeing’s Delta IV Heavy.
The first Falcon 9 test flight took place on June 4, 2010, from Cape Canaveral, and the first resupply mission to the International Space Station took place on October 7, 2012. The Falcon 9 is expected to be replaced in this decade by the Super Heavy-Starship system, whose first stage is capable of lifting 100,000 kg to low-Earth orbit.
This powerful rocket has previously launched another large batch of Starlink satellites into space, to be joined by a CRS-24 cargo mission to the International Space Station in December 2021, Eutelsat’s Hotbird 13F telecommunications satellite in October last year and the OneWeb 1 flight last December.
SpaceX has performed 207 launches to date.