It has been a busy week for SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk. After the successful third test flight of their Starship rocket last Thursday, the company launched their Falcon 9 rocket from their Vandenberg Space Base platform this Tuesday to orbit 22 Starlink satellites.
The Falcon 9 rocket took off from the Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at 3:28 in the morning (Spanish peninsular time), on the Starlink 7-16 mission. It has been the tenth launch of the Falcon 9 first stage booster used in this flight, tail number B1075 of the SpaceX fleet. Previously, the booster was used in two missions for the US Space Development Agency, as well as seven other Starlink missions.
Just over eight minutes after takeoff, the B1075 landed on SpaceX’s unmanned vessel known as “Of Course I Still Love You” (OCISLY). It was the 86th landing on OCISLY and the 285th for a SpaceX rocket to date.
While this mission is taking place, SpaceX and NASA are also preparing to launch a Cargo Dragon from Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida. This will be the thirtieth flight under SpaceX’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA to transport cargo and scientific material to the orbital outpost.
This mission is also notable because it will be the first time that a second-generation Dragon spacecraft is launched to the International Space Station from the SLC-40 platform. The first Dragon capsule was launched aboard the inaugural Falcon 9 rocket from the platform in 2010, but operations were moved to the 39A platform at the Kennedy Space Center after the first-generation Dragon retired following the CRS-20 mission in March 2020.
