NASA postpones the flight to rotate the crew of the space station and allows SpaceX to launch its Starlink.
A SpaceX spacecraft successfully launches 50 Starlink satellites into orbit at the designated time of 00:24.
Using a delay in the weather to their advantage, SpaceX launched 23 more Starlink internet satellites on Thursday during a cloudy leap day launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This marked the 19th successful launch of the year for the rocket company based in California.
Earlier today, NASA canceled the 12:04 a.m. EST Friday launch of three astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the nearby Kennedy Space Center.
William Harwood/CBS News
This is the initial of two scheduled crew rotation missions conducted by NASA and the Russian space agency to replace five of the lab’s seven long-term occupants.
Excluding the most recent flight.
Starlinks launched so far this year: 269
There have been 281 orbital payloads launched this year.
Booster number 6-40 for Starlink: 1076, has its 11th flight.
There have been a total of 216 successful landings on droneships to date.
In total, there have been 278 successful landings by boosters.
204 consecutive successful landings of boosters.
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Source: cbsnews.com