If you were at all worried you missed of a slew of satellites from , then I’ll need you to stop anxiously pacing and relax. The good news is this morning’s launch of 54 satellites has been delayed until tomorrow morning (November 13), due to unfavorable weather conditions in , FL.
SpaceX’s latest mission, dubbed Starlink 31, was grounded just under an hour from its initial launch time, according to reports from — the , not, you know, the .
is now targeting a launch at 7:19 a.m. EST, Saturday morning, and you can watch the livestream . The starts 15 minutes prior to takeoff.
Starlink 31 will see a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with a payload of 54 Starlink satellites. After liftoff, the plan is to separate the payload and land the rocket on the deck of the SpaceX droneship named, “Just Read the Instructions.”
These latest satellites will make up yet another portion of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, meant to provide satellite internet. The eventual launch of these satellites would bring the total number in orbit to 1,844, as Space .
SpaceX , though it’s currently only cleared to fly only 12,000 of these by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Even if the FCC has only cleared SpaceX for less than one third of the satellites it plans to launch, that’s still more than the number of satellites currently orbiting the Earth and even more than every satellite launched, ever:
To put that into perspective, only about 4,300 active artificial satellites currently orbit Earth, and only 11,670 have ever been launched in all of history, .
That’s a lot of space debris for our interplanetary descendants to wade through.