A SpaceX rocket lit up the night sky Sunday on the way to delivering another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The loud and rumbling flight launched at 9:09 p.m. with the Falcon 9 rocket rising away from Space Launch Complex-4.
Approximately eight minutes later, the rocket’s first-stage booster returned to land on a drone ship dubbed Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean south of California.
It was the booster’s 17th launch and landing.
Deployment of the 23 Starlink satellites was set to take place slightly more than an hour after liftoff.
The Vandenberg launch was the day’s second of two Falcon missions delivering Starlink satellites into space, with the first occurring Sunday afternoon from Florida.
The pair of launches came as Starlink revealed efforts to improve the performance of the system designed to provide high-speed, low-latency internet access across the globe, especially areas where service isn’t available or reliable.
This includes reducing latency or the amount of time, typically measured in milliseconds, it takes for a request to be sent from a Starlink router to the internet and for the response to be received.
“Latency is one of the most important factors in your perceived experience when using the internet,” Starlink representatives said in a statement.
“Web pages load faster, audio and video calls feel closer to real-life, and online gaming feels responsive.”
Starlink’s goal aims for a latency of 20 milliseconds, with recent improvements reducing median and worst-case latency around the world.
In the United States, median latency dropped by more than 30%, from 48.5 milliseconds to 33 milliseconds during hours of peak usage, according to Starlink.
Worst-case peak hour latency has dropped by more than 60%, from 150 milliseconds to less than 65 milliseconds, the firm said.
On the Central Coast, latency reportedly ranges from 30 milliseconds to 38 milliseconds, according to Starlink.
Other efforts to improve Starlink for the system’s current 2.6 million customers includes deploying and testing 193 different satellite software builds, 75 gateway software builds, 222 Starlink software builds, and 57 WiFi software builds.
“You can expect latency to continue to improve over the coming weeks and months as we prioritize software changes, build additional ground infrastructure, and launch more satellites,” the Starlink statement said.
The two Sunday launches pushed Starlink closer to the 6,000 satellite milestone since SpaceX began building the space-based constellation.
The number still working sits at roughly 5,500 craft, however.
Sunday’s Vandenberg Falcon launch marked the ninth of 2024 from the West Coast with all but one designated as Starlink missions.