SpaceX marks another major milestone with the launch of Starlink on a busy day

SpaceX is aiming to launch its 16th batch of its Starlink broadband satellites on Saturday, which promises to be a busy day for Elon Musk’s company.

Upgrading a new batch of its orbiting routers has become a matter of routine for SpaceX as it works build a mega constellation
with thousands of individual satellites in a low earth orbit. But this mission is to put a few feathers in Musk’s hat.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket is set to make its seventh flight, which would be a rocket recycling record for the company. The repeater has already carried out four Starlink missions and a couple of larger telecom satellite launches.

SpaceX will likely attempt to land the booster on a drone ship in the Atlantic shortly after launch and may also try to capture the two halves of the cone or fairing with another pair of ships.

All of this only happens about 10 hours after SpaceX is expected to perform another big launch across the country. On Saturday morning, another Falcon 9 will take off from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California carrying the new NASA / European Space Agency Sentinel 6 Michael Freilich satellite designed to monitor global sea level rise and improve weather forecasting.

The launch is currently scheduled for 9:17 am PT and you can find it more information on the mission in our previous coverage.

Starlink launch on Saturday night is scheduled for 7:17 PM PT (10:17 PM ET) on Saturday. You can watch the whole thing right here. We will add live streaming to this post as it becomes available.