SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to tie reuse record with 19th launch tonight

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 52 Starlink satellites from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 17, 2023.
(Image credit: SpaceX)

For the second time in a mere month, SpaceX is poised to tie its rocket-reuse record.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites is scheduled to launch tonight (March 22) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a four-hour window that opens at 7:57 p.m. EDT (2357 GMT). 

It will be the 19th liftoff for this Falcon 9’s first stage, according to a SpaceX mission description. That will tie a mark set by a different booster this past December and matched by another rocket on Feb. 22.

You can watch tonight’s liftoff via SpaceX’s account on X, if it happens. And that’s a very big “if:” As of Thursday afternoon (March 21), forecasts predicted just a 20% chance of weather good enough to allow a launch attempt. If tonight’s try is scrubbed, the next opportunity will come on Saturday evening (March 23).

Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky

If all goes according to plan, the Falcon 9’s first stage will come back to Earth for the 19th time tonight. It will make a vertical landing about 8.5 minutes after liftoff on the drone ship Just Read the Instructions, which will be stationed off the Florida coast.

The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, will deploy the 23 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) about 65 minutes after liftoff.

Tonight’s launch will be the 28th Falcon 9 mission of 2024 already for SpaceX. It will come just a day after the company launched a robotic cargo mission toward the International Space Station for NASA.

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Seventeen of the 27 Falcon 9 missions already in the books this year have been dedicated to building out Starlink, SpaceX’s huge and ever-growing broadband constellation in LEO. Starlink currently consists of more than 5,550 operational spacecraft, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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