SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched 28 more satellites into low Earth orbit on July 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

According to the SpaceX official website, “This was the 22nd flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Crew-6, SES O3b mPOWER-B, USSF-124, Bluebird 1-5, and now 18 Starlink missions.”

The lift-off left the Space Launch Complex on Saturday at 5:01 a.m. ET.

The past week, SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Musk sent more than 8000 Starlink satellites into orbit with the primary purpose of providing high-speed internet, particularly to the underdeveloped regions where internet infrastructure is not available.

The latest launch came after users experienced a total outage of Starlink internet service worldwide. However, the issue was resolved after 1.5 hours.

Michael Nicolls, the VP of Starlink Engineering at SpaceX, took to his X account to inform the users that Starlink has “mostly recovered from the network outage".

He apologised for the network disruption, “We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”

What happened to Starlink satellites?

The Starlink suffered a breakdown for several hours due to an internal software problem.