SpaceX Sends Up Another 60 Starlink Satellites, Sticks the Landing (Again)
A Falcon 9 launched 60 more Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral and landed its booster on a droneship, continuing SpaceX's rapid constellation buildout.
SpaceX kept up its relentless pace this week, launching another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit and landing the first-stage booster right on cue. The Falcon 9 lifted off at 9:25 p.m. EDT on June 3 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, and the booster touched down on the droneship “Of Course I Still Love You” stationed out in the Atlantic.
At this point, the landing is almost the least interesting part of the story — which is itself a remarkable thing to be able to say about a rocket sticking a vertical landing on a boat. That’s how routine SpaceX has made booster recovery look. The real headline is the cargo: 60 more flat-packed satellites headed for low Earth orbit, part of the steadily growing Starlink constellation that SpaceX has been building out in batch after batch this spring.
Why this keeps happening
Starlink’s whole pitch is coverage through sheer numbers. A single satellite in low Earth orbit only covers a sliver of the planet at any given moment, and it moves fast relative to the ground. To get continuous broadband coverage anywhere on Earth, you need thousands of these things working together, handing off connections as they zip overhead. That means SpaceX isn’t launching one or two demonstration satellites and calling it done — it’s mass-producing them and putting up 60 at a time, launch after launch, on a cadence that would have seemed absurd for the industry just a few years ago.
This particular mission was another entry in a launch cadence SpaceX has kept up for months now, using flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters to keep costs down. Reusing hardware is the whole economic case for Starlink actually working as a business — expendable rockets would make a constellation this size prohibitively expensive to build and maintain.
Where things stand
With this batch up, the constellation continues to grow toward the scale SpaceX says it needs before offering meaningful broadband service. The company has talked about beginning limited service to select users later this year, though hard details on timing and pricing are still thin. In the meantime, each launch adds incrementally to the mesh of satellites now orbiting overhead.
It’s worth pausing on how normalized this has become in just a few years. Landing an orbital-class rocket booster used to be sunlight science fiction; now it’s a Wednesday night at Cape Canaveral. Whether Starlink itself succeeds as a business is still an open question — ground terminal costs, regulatory approval in different countries, and competition from other satellite broadband efforts are all unresolved variables. But the infrastructure to attempt it, at least, keeps piling up in orbit, one droneship landing at a time.