SpaceX completed its final Falcon 9 launch from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center early Wednesday evening. The Starlink 6-51 mission took place about a week and a half after launching its first Bandwagon-1 rideshare mission from that same launch pad.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket took place at 5:26 p.m. EDT (9:26 p.m. UTC), opening a launch window of approximately four hours.
With this launch, SpaceX is now one flight away from matching the total number of Space Shuttle missions from this historic launch pad. This is the 81st flight of a Falcon rocket, compared to 82 flights in total.
There have been a total of 174 orbital flights from the LC-39A. Nine of these were Falcon Heavy rockets, with the remaining 72 being Falcon 9 rockets. There have also been 11 Saturn 5 launches from this platform.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, tail number B1077 in the SpaceX fleet, was launched for the 12th time. It previously supported missions such as the Crew-5 flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the GPS 3 Space Vehicle 06 geostationary satellite, and a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft on the NG-20 mission to the International Space Station .
About 8.5 minutes after takeoff, B1077 landed on the SpaceX drone, “Just Read the Instructions.” This is JRTI’s 78th booster landing and SpaceX’s 298th landing to date. This comes just days after the B1062 achieved flight leader status with 20 total launches.
The 23 Starlink satellites on board are in addition to the 5,809 currently in orbit, according to astronomer and orbital tracking expert Jonathan McDowell. SpaceX has launched 564 Starlink satellites so far in 2024 and this will be its 26th flight this year to add more.
