Let you Collect the full information about SpaceX’s 40 Satellites Launched. Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched 40 satellites for rival communications company OneWeb on Friday. The last time this happened was on December 7, 1972, just a few miles from the same pad where the Apollo astronauts blasted for the moon.
This is the first of three planned missions. Besides another launch with ISRO, two more dedicated launches with SpaceX are planned through spring next year. The Falcon rocket blasts off at sunset carrying 40 mini-satellites for polar orbit. They will expand OneWeb’s constellation to just over 500, about 80% of the planned total of about 630 satellites.
OneWeb, which is building an initial constellation of 648 satellites into low Earth orbit, was originally contracted to launch all of the company’s satellites on Russian Soyuz rockets. But the British company cut ties with Russia in March following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Russian Soyuz rockets have already launched 13 batches of OneWeb satellites since 2019. OneWeb then entered into launch agreements with SpaceX, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and startup Relativity.
OneWeb already provides Internet service in Alaska, Canada and Northern Europe; The new satellites will increase range throughout the United States and Europe, as well as large parts of Africa and South America and elsewhere, according to Ladovaz.
The OneWeb satellites — each about the size of a washing machine and weighing 330 pounds (150 kilograms) — are built at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center through a joint venture with France’s Airbus. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 3,200 Starlink satellites in orbit, delivering high-speed, broadband internet to remote corners of the world. Amazon plans to launch its first Internet satellite from Cape Canaveral early next year.
