This morning, Israel time, SpaceX, the space company, marked another record in its truly endless series of records celebrating this year, when it carried out its 90th successful launch since the beginning of the year. In doing so, it comes close to fulfilling founder Elon Musk's goal of 100 successful launches by 2023. This compares with 61 successful launches in 2022. At the current rate of launching every 2.5 days, the company may indeed meet its target. By next year, Musk has set an even more ambitious target of 144 launches.
The Falcon 9 rocket was launched at 7:07 a.m. local time, or midnight and seven minutes local time at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, and carried on its back 23 additional internet satellites that will join the Starlink service system, which is expected to begin operating in Israel in the coming days. The first stage of the rocket – its large part, which contains the fuel to reach speed enough to escape gravity – landed 8.5 minutes after takeoff on a robotic barge in the Atlantic Ocean. This is the ninth landing of this particular missile.
About 65 minutes after launch, the 23 satellites were released into Earth orbit. The number of active satellites in service has recently crossed the 5,000 mark, with the company having approval for almost 20,000 satellites, and has been working for an entire year to set the approval to 30,000.
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