SpaceX's drone ship is already on its way to the ocean to prepare for Elon Musk's space exploration company's first-ever Falcon 9 Starlink mission in 2022.
According to Teslarati, the Musk-led space company plans to kick off its 2022 launch of a new batch of Starlink broadband satellites via the Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, Jan. 6.
The future space mission will be SpaceX's 34th devoted to the Starlink satellites. Meanwhile, it will be SpaceX's first Falcon 9 rocket launch and landing of the year.
However, SpaceX's "A Shortfall Gravitas" drone ship has already left Port Canaveral in preparation for the impending Starlink satellite space mission in a few days. Expressly, the drone ship set sail for the first time in 2022.
In the same news report, Teslarati projected that the SpaceX drone ship will arrive at the Falcon 9 recovery site around a day before the rocket's maiden flight in 2022.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink Mission 2022: Drone Ship Out
According to a report by SpaceFlightNow, the Falcon 9 rocket's maiden flight this year will be only for the increased deployment of Starlink broadband satellites into Earth's orbit.
Nearly 4,400 satellites will be deployed as part of the Starlink mission for 2022, which aims to expand the space firm's high-speed, low-latency internet service throughout the world.
The Falcon 9 is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 6 for its broadband satellite mission.
The landing of the first stage booster of the SpaceX rocket, on the other hand, is taking place on the company's drone ship, which is now sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
Furthermore, SpaceFlightNow said in the same article that SpaceX is preparing for another liftoff mission, which is set to launch on Jan. 13.
More SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches
In July 2022, SpaceX will launch NASA's Psyche mission to a rare metal asteroid. Space.com said that the mission will launch from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, using one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets.
The expedition will investigate Psyche, a metallic asteroid that circles the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid looks to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of our solar system's building elements. As a result, examining this new asteroid will provide fresh insights into the formation of terrestrial planets like Earth.
The Psyche mission will launch in June 2019, almost three years after the previous Falcon Heavy flight. The rocket has a busy year ahead of it, with at least three US Space Force missions and commercial payloads scheduled to launch in 2022, including a Viasat-3 broadband satellite and an Astranis communications satellite.
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