Before December 21, 2015, the landing of a 50-meter launch vehicle was a sci-fi scene, and since then the Falcon fleet has been diligently increasing the number of successful returns.
Another Starlink launch took place last night, which in itself wouldn’t be newsworthy these days, as SpaceX has already completed its eighth in-house mission this month alone. But the company reached another amazing milestone thanks to the Starlink 6-53 mission: one of the first stages of the Falcon rocket family returned successfully for the 300th time!
In order to achieve this, of course, another Falcon-9 had to be launched first, from the fleet of 16 active launch vehicles, the B1078 first stage was designated to put the 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. The carrier, starting its ninth voyage, started its nine Merlin-1D engines at 00:17 Hungarian time and began the ascent. Even after the stage separation, everything happened according to the usual scenario: the second stage reached the designated orbital path with two engine maneuvers, and the first stage reached the waiting Just Read The Instructions landed on a drone ship nearly 8.5 minutes after launch, thus achieving the significant achievement mentioned above.
With the successful separation of the satellites, SpaceX secured its 41st, overall 335th successful mission of this year out of 341 so far, and 327 flights are listed in addition to the name of the Falcon-9 rocket type.
Tags: Falcon9 stage successfully returned #300th time
