SpaceX tied its rocket reuse record on Saturday night (April 27).
This will be the 20th launch of the Falcon 9's first stage at 8:34 pm EDT (0034 GMT on April 28) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
This will be the 20th launch of the Falcon 9 first stage SpaceX mission description. It equaled a mark set by a different Falcon 9 booster earlier this month in the launch of SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites.
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The launch was added to the Galileo constellation, Europe's equivalent of America's Global Positioning System (GPS). Twenty-eight Galileo satellites have been launched to date, all on Russian-built Soyuz rockets or Europe's Ariane 5.
But Ariane 5 was retired last summer without a ready successor, and Europe severed its space ties with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. So, late last year, the European Space Agency signed an agreement with SpaceX. 2024 Four Galileo craft on two launches. Saturday's mission was presumably the first of those two liftoffs.
The Galileo satellites are in a medium-Earth orbit 14,430 miles (23,222 kilometers) above our planet, meaning there will be no rocket landings tonight — a rarity for a SpaceX flight these days.
„This mission marks the 20th and final launch for this Falcon 9 first-stage booster due to the additional performance required to deliver the payload into medium Earth orbit,” SpaceX wrote in the mission description.
The Falcon 9 stage, which already has 20 launches under its belt, landed safely on April 12 after its record-breaking mission. Starlink satellites fly in low-Earth orbit, so the booster had enough fuel left over to return to Earth.
Saturday's launch kicked off a busy weekend for SpaceX; The company plans to launch another Starlink suite on Sunday evening (April 28) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, next door to KSC.
And the weekend is the busiest part of the year. SpaceX has already launched 41 orbital missions by 2024, 28 of which are dedicated to building the Starlink megaconstellation.