SpaceX Starlink Group 4-12 Launch

SCANALYZER The Happening World
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SpaceX plans to launch 53 Starlink satellites into Shell 4, with an eventual 540 km circular service orbit at 53.22° inclination, on 2022-03-19 at 03:23 UTC (which will be late in the evening of March 18th in some western hemisphere time zones). This will be the 12th flight of Falcon 9 booster B1051, making it, if successful, the fleet leader with the most flights. Among its 11 previous flights have been 8 Starlink launches.

Weather is forecast as 70% favourable for launch. This launch marks the return to the northerly ascent trajectory taking advantage of better sea conditions in the booster and fairing recovery zone as spring approaches. This allows increasing the payload to 53 satellites from the 48 launched on the previous flight from Florida.

Here is a pre-flight preview from Everyday Astronaut.

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The launch, landing, and payload delivery were all successful. I have cued the video replay to start at one minute before launch.

If you look closely at the first stage video starting at 21:20 and up to the start of the landing burn, you can see flashes of lightning illuminating clouds beyond the landing zone. This is more apparent if you view in a separate window to show the video at a larger scale.

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