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SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink 6-32 lifts off at 12:33am EST on December 23. 2023 Photo: Charles Boyer / Talk of Titusville

SpaceX launched a record-breaking mission shortly after midnight this morning at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when it lofted 33 Starlink satellites to orbit in a mission the company designated Starlink 6-32: it flew a Falcon 9 booster successfully for the 19th time.

Booster 1058 has a long list of flights, and is an important part of NASA and SpaceX history: on its first flight, Booster 1058 launched Demo-2 on May 30, 2020, which was NASAs first crewed flight launched from American soil since the Space Shuttle mission STS-135 departed Kennedy Space Center in 2011. Since then, the booster carried South Koreas first military satellite,Anasis-11, the ISS resupply mission CRS-21, Transporter-1 and Transporter-3 rideshare launches, and 13 Starlink missions.

It was a warm and somewhat muggy Florida evening on the Space Coast, with a wave of showers that came ashore mid-evening. The launch window opened at 11:00pm on December 22, and SpaceX orginally announced a liftoff shortly after that. As the evening progressed and the weather slowly improved, launch time was delayed an hour to 12:02am December 23, then 12:33am. The rocket ascended through broken, mostly cloudy skies, but was visible to onlookers from the ground for quite some time.

After staging, the second stage seperated successfully and ignited its Merlin Vacuum engine to contine its ascent to orbit. Around 8.5 minutes after launch, its job done, Booster 1058 touched down on the automated droneship Just Read the Instructionsnortheast of the Bahamas. It will return to Port Canaveral and then to Hangar X, SpaceXs facility on Roberts Road in Kennedy Space Center. After evaluation, the venerable booster could be cleared for another prep cycle and launched again at some future date.

Next up on the SpaceX manifest is a potential doubleheader on December 28, 2023: SpaceX and the United States Space Force have previously announced that day as the target to try to send the Boeing X37-B spaceplane to orbit aboard a Falcon Heavy from pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, while Starlink Group 6-36 is also nominally slated to launch the same evening. For the latter launch, the company has not announced an official date and time for liftoff.

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SpaceX Launches Starlink 6-32 From the Cape | TalkOfTitusville.com - Talk of Titusville