SpaceX: The Falcon 9 launch vehicle on Sunday should launch into orbit with another batch of mini-satellites to replenish the orbital constellation of the global Internet coverage network of the Starlink system, said the American developer SpaceX.
« The team completes pre-flight checks and prepares for the launch of (satellites) Starlink no earlier than Sunday, February 26, » the company said.
Meanwhile, SpaceX noted that if the weather is favorable and everything is ready for the planned February 27 launch of the Crew Dragon-6 manned spacecraft to the ISS, the launch of Starlink satellites will be postponed. The company noted that the launch of Dragon-6 is a priority.
Both launches will be from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
SpaceX is reportedly scheduled to launch 22 Starlink internet satellites into orbit. This will be the 75th launch of devices since May 2019 as part of the Starlink project and the seventh since the beginning of the year. SpaceX has launched nearly 4,000 Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. Unfortunately, some of them failed or went out of orbit. About 3.7 thousand devices remain in orbit in working order.
According to NASA, on February 27, the American SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with an international crew, which includes American astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Al-Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, is to launch to the ISS on February 27.
The launch will be carried out using a Falcon 9 launch vehicle from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A. It is planned that, in total, the crew will spend six months at the station.
Under the agreement, two missions are being carried out to the ISS – in September last year; the Russian Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was launched to the station, which, in addition to the Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin, includes NASA astronaut Francisco Rubio.
In October, the launch of the American ship Crew Dragon-5 took place, on which Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina arrived at the station.
