A SpaceX Starlink launch scheduled for Friday morning has been delayed due to poor weather conditions across Florida's Space Coast.
In a tweet posted on Friday morning, SpaceX said the company is now targeting 7:19 a.m. ET on Saturday, November 13, for the launch from Cape Canaveral on the state's east coast.
Elon Musk's company said the forecast improves to "80 percent favorable" for tomorrow's launch opportunity.
"We're going ahead and scrubbing today's launch opportunity due to an unfavorable local weather forecast, and also unfavorable recovery weather, with tomorrow having a much better option," SpaceX's launch director said, according to Spaceflight Now.
The aim of the Falcon 9 launch is to deploy a batch of 53 Starlink broadband satellites in an orbit ranging between 131 miles and 210 miles in altitude.
After deployment, the quarter-ton satellites will unfurl power-generating solar arrays and use their thrusters to raise themselves to an altitude of 335 miles where they will begin to form a new orbital "shell" in the Starlink network.
The goal of the Starlink project is to provide superfast global internet coverage with very low latency, even in rural or remote areas that may normally lack reliable connectivity.
To achieve this, the company is planning to deploy tens of thousands of mass-produced broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit, creating a "mega-constellation" that will communicate with receivers on the ground.
Starlink satellites are being deployed far closer to Earth than traditional internet satellites, which the company says will result in lower latency and thus "the ability to support services typically not possible with traditional satellite internet."
So far, SpaceX has deployed almost 1,800 Starlink satellites over the course of around 30 launches, although some of those have been de-orbited or are not currently functioning. A Starlink beta service is currently available in 19 countries on a limited basis.
The latest Starlink mission that is now scheduled for Saturday will be SpaceX's 25th launch of 2021, all of which have used the company's partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. B1058, the Falcon 9 booster that will hopefully carry the 53-satellite batch into orbit on Saturday, has been involved in eight previous missions.
After lifting off, the Falcon 9's first stage booster is expected to separate around two-and-a-half minutes into the mission, and will subsequently try and land on SpaceX's drone ship "Just Read the Instructions" located around 400 miles away from the launch site in the Atlantic Ocean.
If all goes to plan on Saturday, the latest Starlink mission will be SpaceX's second launch this week. On Wednesday, another Falcon 9 rocket launched carrying a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
You can watch the launch live via SpaceX's website or the company's YouTube channel.
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Aristos is a Newsweek science reporter with the London, U.K., bureau. He reports on science and health topics, including; animal, ... Read more
