• The incident occurred a few miles from the same pad where the Apollo astronauts last flew to the Moon on December 7, 1972.
Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched 40 satellites for rival communications company OneWeb on Friday. It happened just a few miles from the same pad where the Apollo astronauts flew to the Moon for the last time on December 7, 1972.
It is the first of three planned missions. In addition to another launch with ISRO, the next two dedicated launches with SpaceX are planned through the spring of next year.
The Falcon rocket blasted off at sunset with 40 mini-satellites bound for polar orbit. They will expand OneWeb's constellation to just over 500, about 80% of the planned total of 630 satellites.
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 8, 2022
OneWeb, which is building an initial group of 648 satellites in low Earth orbit, originally contracted to launch all of the company's satellites on Russian Soyuz rockets. But after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the British company severed ties with Russia in March. Russian Soyuz rockets had already launched 13 batches of OneWeb satellites in early 2019.
OneWeb then signed launch agreements with SpaceX, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and startup Relativity.
OneWeb already provides Internet service in Alaska, Canada and northern Europe; According to Ladovaj, the latest satellites will extend the range to all of the Americas and Europe, as well as large parts of Africa and South America, and elsewhere.
The OneWeb satellites — each the size of a washing machine and weighing 330 pounds (150 kg) — are built at NASA's Kennedy Space Center through a joint venture with France's Airbus.
Elon Musk's SpaceX has more than 3,200 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing high-speed, broadband internet to remote corners of the globe.
Amazon plans to launch its first Internet satellite from Cape Canaveral early next year.
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