Falcon 9 to Launch Starlink Satellites From Vandenberg Tonight
VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (SpaceX PR) — SpaceX is targeting Monday, September 13 for a Falcon 9 launch of 51 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The instantaneous window is at 8:55 p.m. PDT, or September 14 at 3:55 UTC, and a backup opportunity is available on Tuesday, September 14 at 8:56 p.m. PDT, or September 15 at 3:56 UTC.
The booster supporting this mission previously launched Telstar 18 VANTAGE, Iridium-8, and seven Starlink missions. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean. One half of Falcon 9’s fairing halves previously supported NROL-108 and the other previously flew on GPS III-3 and Turksat-5A.
A live webcast of this mission will begin about 15 minutes prior to liftoff.
15 responses to “Falcon 9 to Launch Starlink Satellites From Vandenberg Tonight”
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good fortune and safe flights
That’s two hours after sunset. Looks like the sun illumination altitude at that time is around 600 miles. So no illuminated plume show tonight, but the engine burns will be visible. Go SpaceX!
Yes, should generate some good UFO reports.?
At least from AZ the rocket plume can be seen, and will be moving at a nice clip, but it won’t generate the shock and awe of a sunlit condensation trail expanding in the vacuum.
I could not see too much from my yard the trees are too filled in with all the rains we had. I caught a glimpse or two. One of my coworkers had a clear view on Kitt Peak.
assuming the full constellation gets deployed…does anyone have any ideas what the projected download speeds are?
Go look on YouTube there are people giving weekly, and monthly reviews on an ongoing basis. They are getting some good upload, download, and acceptable latency. Latency is what most of them complain about, but the numbers reported are 1/10th of the latency with the GEO service. I think Starlink said last week that they are serving 500,000 subscribers.
I’ll give it a look. I am seeing tops of about 170mps downlinked…thats really good compared to what was, but of course no where near cable speeds…I was curious because of some of the houses we were looking at in Seattle 🙂
https://www.pcmag.com/news/…
found this…10 would be amazing. I would settle for 1gbps
I slum it at 12 Mbit/sec, and my cable carrier force upgraded me from 5. I think the internet peaked in 1997. 🙂
we are seeing around 800 mbps constantly on both lines. the family line and the one that the NSF keeps here
Dude, your house is a 1990’s national backbone. You could rent out serious rackspace with that thruput.
yeah we worked at it. I do a lot of stuff with NSF on the south pole and some of the satellites that are used for com there. its largely automated…but it burns the bandwidth…plus my wife and kids watch a lot of TV 🙂
Are you saying that your wife and kids are on par with the US research stations at the South Pole? Actually I had a friend down there on winter overs and he said when the GEO birds would set, the station would go to banked Iridium satellites and their 9600 baud service. There was a published schedule it was so bad. I could see YouTube overwhelming even all of the Iridium constellation with each node at 9600 baud. But from what I see on the Starlink reviews, the poles are going to get some serious internet.
I do some things that most would refer to as “piddling” but they fill a reasonable void. there are a group of old geo satellites that are cobbled together to give “reasonable” speed links to the continent. I am an up and down link for 5 of them..plus I hold a 40 meter HF low data rate link with Mc station. another “thing” I do is that I am a ground station for 19 cubesats where the folks who run it can use my station (or send me packets) that my computers will uplink and take down link acknowledgement to. I have to know what they are doing (part of the command station laws of ham radio) but I do littl emore then have the station send and take…
I am part of the “aging” study of experimental GPS satellites and command control and recieve data from three of the old VELA satellites 🙂
My favorite thing though is the SARA HF astronomy satellite..
Finally (whew) I am a command and control station for the Navy ionesphere monitoring system. its really the old transit sat nav system where the message buffer of the satellite is now used as a store and forward system. our prime “use” these days is receiving and sending data to uncrewed bouys etc…
My computers do most of this…