SpaceX Starlink Group 4-13 Launch

SpaceX plans to launch 53 Starlink satellites into Shell 4, with an eventual 540 km circular service orbit at 53.22° inclination, on 2022-05-13 at 22:07 UTC. The launch will be from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage booster, B1063, will be making its fifth flight, having previously launched the Starlink Group 4-11 mission from Vandenberg on 2022-02-25.

Here is the pre-flight preview from Everyday Astronaut.

A second Starlink launch, Group 4-15, is planned from Florida less than 24 hours later, at 20:38 UTC on 2022-05-14. I will put up a post about it once the livestream becomes available.

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The launch, booster recovery, orbital insertion, and payload deployment were completely successful. I have cued the replay video to start a minute before launch; scroll back to see the preliminaries.

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… the 112th successful recovery of a Falcon 9 first stage booster …

And yet NASA’s throw-away SLS rocket stumbles on towards its one & only flight. Profligate waste & insanity in full view – and yet no-one does anything to stop it.

Ah well! If those guys were not working on SLS, they would probably be making Stinger missiles to send (free of charge) to the terrorist arms markets in the rather corrupt Ukraine. Maybe we are better off with the SLS.

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