SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 successfully launched 56 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit on Sunday, May 14 at 1:03 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The batch of 56 Starlink satellites tie the record for the heaviest payload ever launched by a SpaceX rocket, matching the figure on four previous Falcon 9 missions with a full load of Starlink spacecraft.
The mission is numbered Starlink 5-9 in SpaceX’s launch sequence making today’s total half of SpaceX’s 32 launches this year dedicated to the Starlink broadband network. SpaceX says each Starlink launch adds more than a terabit per second of capacity to the constellation.
Following stage separation, the first stage landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Tday’s launch totals 4,447 Starlink satellites SpaceX has sent into orbit.
This is the eleventh flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13G, mPOWER-a and three Starlink missions.