November 11th Starlink 1

9:56 am EST, atop a Falcon 9 from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fl.

With a three month absence of rocket launches on Florida's space coast, SpaceX has ended the drought bringing us the official Starlink 1 mission. Officially the first group of operational Starlink Satellites is now in orbit. For the ninth Falcon 9 launched this year, booster 1048 earned it's .4 after landing safely downrange on the drone ship " Of Course I Still Love You". The .4 meaning it has successfully completed 4 missions now.

60 is the magic number when launching Starlinks, and the number in today's batch going into orbit. They are destined for low Earth orbit and bring the total to 120 total Starlink satellites in orbit if we count the previous demo bunch. They do differ however, most noticeably with how they includ Ka-band antennas, and are designed to be completely destroyed upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. On November 7th the FCC ( Federal Communications Commision) granted SpaceX a special Temporarl Authority to change the deployment altitude of the satellites. Instead of deploying into a 440 km orbit like the previous demo mission this will deploy into a 280 km orbit.