A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 23 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station tonight during a four-hour window that opens at 10:35 p.m. EDT (0235 GMT on May 23).
SpaceX will webcast the launch live via its X account, beginning about five minutes before the window opens.
Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky
The Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth about 8 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan; it will touch down on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
It will be the eighth launch and landing for this particular first stage, according to a SpaceX mission description. Among its seven previous liftoffs were three Starlink missions and the Ax-2 and Ax-3 private astronaut missions to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, will carry the 23 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), deploying them there about 65 minutes after liftoff.
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Tonight’s liftoff will be the second of the day for SpaceX. Early this morning, the company launched the NROL-146 mission from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, sending a set of satellites aloft for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.
That was SpaceX’s 52nd orbital launch of the year already. Thirty-six of those missions have been dedicated to building out the huge and ever-growing Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of about 5,950 working satellites.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.