SpaceX launches 27 mini-Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched 27 mini-Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. This launch had been aborted at T-11 seconds two days ago when an airplane had entered the range unexpectedly.
The 2025 launch race:
10 SpaceX
4 China
1 Blue Origin
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SpaceX today successfully launched 27 mini-Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. This launch had been aborted at T-11 seconds two days ago when an airplane had entered the range unexpectedly.
The 2025 launch race:
10 SpaceX
4 China
1 Blue Origin
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
> drone ship in the Atlantic
Was that a copy/pasta error?
That would be a new thing – launching from Vandy and landing in the Atlantic.
Arrrg… Pasta Errors! That‘s worse than the Spaghetti Incident!
Marshall: Thank you. The error was in my brain entirely. Fixed.
I’ll confess I initially wondered if that “27” in the payload description wasn’t another case of errant keyboarding but other sources concur. That would seem to indicate that the V2-mini version of the Starlink sat has been recently sent to a fat farm and emerged more svelte. If they now tip the scales at little enough that 27 at a time can be flown from Vandy, perhaps 30 or more will soon be departing on each mission out of KSC/Canaveral. That will, of course, accelerate SpaceX’s pace of Starlink deployments even above and beyond what would be expected from the F9’s advancing launch cadence.
Both the increases to cadence and the reducing regimen administered to Starlink V2-minis suggest that both will play a continuing role in building out the population and capacity of the Starlink constellation even with Starship is perhaps as little as a couple of months away from the start of it own heavyweight contributions to the cause. I foresee F9 and the V2-mini continuing Starlink missions at maximum achievable chat until the constellation reaches the maximum number of ca. 42,000 specified in its current and pending FCC licenses. Only when that occurs – and all V1 and V1.5 Starlinks have been replaced and de-orbited as well – might F9-based Starlink deployment missions end. I think we will be seeing such missions continue for at least another five years and perhaps for even longer if not only the mass of V2-minis continues to decline but their bandwidth capacity also takes steps upward.