Booster 1058 is a distinctive member of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 fleet because it was emblazoned with a red NASA “worm” logo before the May 2020 flight of Demo-2, the first Crew Dragon mission to carry astronauts. This photo of the soot-covered thruster was captured in December 2020 after the space station’s CRS-21 cargo resupply mission, its fourth launch and landing. Image: Michael Cain/Space Flight Now.
SpaceX will test the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket Sunday evening when it launches a booster on a record 16th flight. The launch was originally scheduled before dawn on Sunday, but SpaceX opted to target a rare backup opportunity 12 hours later in the evening, 13 minutes after sunset. Falcon 9 is now scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral at 11:58 PM EDT (03:58 UTC Monday) with the fifth batch of second-generation Starlink satellites.
The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavor capsule. The first stage is distinctive in SpaceX’s fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA “worm” logo on its fuselage. It flew again 14 more times, including launches of South Korea’s Anasis 2 military communications satellite, space station cargo deliveries, two Transporter shuttle missions, and ten batches of Starlink satellites . With 15 flights already completed, it is the joint fleet leader with the 1060 booster.
The company originally hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.
“We’re up to 10 [flights] and the vehicles still looked really good, so we started the effort to qualify for the 15,” Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.
SpaceX is now pushing the envelope even further by exceeding the previously certified 15 flight limit. More than 200 days have passed since the last flight of booster 1058. During that time, SpaceX has likely conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.
For its 16th trip into space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink ‘V2 mini’ satellites into orbit, in a mission designated Starlink 6-5.
After liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, it will head southeast, aiming for an orbit inclined 43 degrees to the equator. After separating from the second stage about two and a half minutes into flight, booster 1058 will descend for a landing on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic east of the Bahamas .
Two second stage burns will be required to place the satellites into the required 323 by 315 km orbit. The separation of the 22 satellites is planned for just over an hour of flight.
File photo of SpaceX’s Starlink V2 Mini satellites inside a payload processing facility at Cape Canaveral. Image: SpaceX
It will be the fifth launch of the so-called V2 mini satellites which are larger and have four times the bandwidth of previous models. The full-sized Starlink V2 satellites are to be launched by SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship vehicle, but the delayed debut of Starship led SpaceX to create a condensed version of the satellites so they could be launched on Falcon 9.
According to statistics compiled by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and widely respected expert on spaceflight activity, this mission will bring the total number of Starlink spacecraft launched to 4,768, and the number of Starlink satellites currently in orbit to 4,435.
In early May, SpaceX announced that it had 1.5 million subscribers to Starlink. Internet service is available in more than 56 countries.
