SpaceX completed its 200th space launch on Friday, delivering two satellites from the Luxembourgish-French satellite operator SES into orbit. The Falcon 9 was launched at 5:48 pm ET (Saturday at 01:48 am Moscow time) from the SLC-40 launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Image Source: SpaceX
Less than nine minutes after launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9, which had been used for launches eight times before, landed on an offshore autonomous platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The deployment of the O3b mPOWER satellites to their intended Medium Earth Orbits (MEO) was completed approximately two hours after launch.
The O3b mPower spacecraft are the first in a future SES constellation of 11 high-capacity, low-latency satellites to provide multi-terabit global broadband. All of them will be placed in medium earth orbits.
Currently, SpaceX launches are carried out using the Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket. In total, SpaceX performed 191 launches using the Falcon 9, and five more using the Falcon 1 between 2006 and 2009. And four more SpaceX orbital missions have been completed using the Falcon Heavy, which uses three modified Falcon 9 first stages. In addition, this year SpaceX has completed a record number of space launches – 57.
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