SpaceX Launches 21 Starlink Satellites on First Mission After Starship Explosion

Five days after the company’s Starship megarocket test mission ended in an explosion, SpaceX is getting ready to launch another batch of Starlink broadband satellites early on Tuesday morning, January 21.

During a roughly four-hour launch window that starts at 12:24 a.m. EST (0524 GMT), a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 Starlink satellites is scheduled to fly from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

Starting about five minutes before liftoff, SpaceX’s X account will webcast the launch live.

It is anticipated that the Falcon 9’s first stage would return to Earth about eight minutes after launch, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean aboard the drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas.”

Explained that a SpaceX mission synopsis, this mission is the seventh time this particular booster has been launched and landed. Starlink missions have accounted for three of its seven prior flights.

The 21 Starlink satellites will be deployed around 65 minutes after launch by the Falcon 9’s upper stage, which will carry them to low Earth orbit.

This launch will be SpaceX’s tenth launch of the year and the ninth Falcon 9 mission of 2025. The previous mission, which took place in South Texas on Thursday, January 16, was SpaceX’s eighth Starship megarocket test flight.

That flight had mixed results: the upper stage detonated 8.5 minutes after liftoff, most likely as a result of a fuel leak, but the Super Heavy booster returned to its launch site successfully for a spectacular grab by the tower’s “chopstick” arms.