SpaceX launches Falcon 9 pre-sunrise Monday
A pre-sunrise SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaked across pink-hued clouds and sky Monday morning, treating Brevard Public Schools students, parents and personnel to a spectacular sight as they prepared for the first day of school.
After scheduled launch attempts didn’t pan out Saturday or Sunday, the Falcon 9 soared skyward at 6:37 a.m. EDT — a photogenic 13 minutes before sunrise — from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The Falcon 9 first-stage booster later settled atop SpaceX’s drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean, completing its 17th mission. The venerable booster previously launched SES-22, ispace’s HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1 and 11 Starlink missions.
The rocket deployed another payload of 23 Starlink broadband satellites, which were packed inside the 230-foot rocket’s fairing. During a fireside chat last week at the Mountain Connect Broadband Development Conference in Denver, Colorado, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said fiber optic cable is better suited to serving densely populated cities — but Starlink satellite internet best serves less-populated places.
“What’s brilliant about the constellation concept is that it is very complementary with fiber,” Shotwell said.
She noted that cable installation can cost $10,000 to $30,000 per mile — and, “I can bridge that gap with one Starlink kit, which is 500 bucks.”
“What we really want to make sure folks understand is, yeah, we can serve cities — but we can’t serve everybody in cities, right? But we can serve everybody in (the) rural U.S. and semi-rural,” she said.
SpaceX’s Starlink 10-7 mission initially got bumped off Saturday’s schedule. Then the launch countdown scrubbed just 46 seconds before liftoff on Sunday. SpaceX did not publicly disclose why that scrub occurred.
Looking ahead at the Eastern Range calendar — though SpaceX has yet to announce this mission — a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency navigational warning indicates a Falcon 9 will launch two Maxar Intelligence WorldView Legion satellites Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The launch window opens at 9 a.m. and extends until 12:28 p.m.
For the latest news and launch schedule from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/ space.
Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at Rneale@floridatoday.com. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1