Spacex launched another 24 satellites for its Starlink internet service from the West Coast Wednesday evening.
Liftoff of the Starlink 17-45 mission from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California occurred at 8:30 p.m. PDT (11:30 p.m. EDT / 0330 UTC).
The 24 Starlink V2 Mini satellites were propelled on a south-southwesterly trajectory from Vandenberg atop Falcon 9 first stage B1081, making its 25th flight. The booster landed on the drone ship ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ about 8.5 minutes after launch, with deployment of the satellites from the second stage following just over an hour into flight.
California has become home to SpaceX’s workhorse launch pad in 2026 with the company’s decision to focus more on Starship operations at Cape Canaveral. Wednesday’s mission is the seventh of eight launches SpaceX plans from Vandenberg in June, compared with six planned Florida launches this month.
Although it has two launch pads at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX is only launching Falcon 9 rockets from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and is dedicating Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center for Falcon Heavy missions so construction of its first East Coast Starship facility at 39A can continue with fewer interruptions. Also, SpaceX announced in April it was repurposing one of its two East Coast Falcon 9 droneships, ‘Just Read the Instructions’, for transporting Starship components from Starbase to Florida.
If the current schedule holds, SpaceX will have launched 40 missions from Vandenberg versus 37 from Cape Canaveral in the first half of 2026.
The launch of the Starlink 17-28 mission on June 21 set a new turnaround for the pad at Space Launch Complex 4E, occurring about 56 hours after the previous flight. So fast was the turnaround that the booster for that previous mission, NROL-179, which landed back at Vandenberg, was still visible at the landing zone.
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