SpaceX plans to launch 20 more of its Starlink broadband satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capability, from California early Wednesday morning (September 25).
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 20 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California’s central coast at 3:01 a.m. EDT (7:01 a.m. GMT; 9:01 p.m. California time on Sept. 24) on Wednesday.
You can follow the action live via SpaceX’s X account; the broadcast begins about five minutes before launch.
If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will return to Earth 8.5 minutes after launch and land on the SpaceX drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Pacific Ocean.
According to a mission description from SpaceX, it will be the tenth launch and landing of this particular booster.
The Falcon 9 upper stage, meanwhile, will continue its journey into low Earth orbit and deploy the 20 satellites there 60 minutes after launch. The new arrivals will join the Starlink mega-constellation, which consists of more than 6,300 active spacecraft.
Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky
The Starlink launch is part of what is normally a busy week for SpaceX. Elon Musk’s company plans to launch the Crew-9 astronaut mission for NASA to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday (Sept. 28), sending it aloft on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Crew-9 is not a typical ISS astronaut mission. It will launch with two crew members instead of the usual four, as it will bring back to Earth two people already living on the ISS – NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who arrived in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Starliner had problems with its engines on the way to the ISS, so NASA decided to bring the spacecraft home unmanned. Williams and Wilmore will return home with the two Crew 9 astronauts – Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos – aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “Freedom” in February 2025.
