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This brings the total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to more than 2,000 as a two-stage SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
About nine minutes later, the rocket’s first stage came down to Earth for a touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.
This was the 10th successful landing for this particular booster, which had previously launched six dedicated Starlink missions, the GPS III-3 satellite for the US military, the Turksat 5A satellite for Turkey, and the Transporter 2 rideshare mission which lifted 85 small satellites and three Starlink craft.
The Falcon 9 eventually deployed the 49 satellites roughly 15 minutes after launch.
The second stage was out of range of ground stations when that happened, so confirmation of deployment success didn’t come until about an hour later.
Yesterday’s launch was SpaceX’s 36th Starlink mission and is already the third one this year.
The company launched satellites on January 6 and a ‘rideshare’ mission on January 13 that put 105 small satellites in orbit.
SpaceX had launched 1,993 Starlinks before Tuesday’s flight, of which 1,741 are thought to be functional.
The company has regulatory approval to launch more than 12,000 Starlinks to provide space-based commercial internet access to customers anywhere in the world.
‘1,469 Starlink satellites active. 272 moving to operational orbits. Laser links activate soon,’ SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
Elon Musk is using SpaceX’s experience in building rockets and spacecraft to deploy the world’s most advanced broadband internet system using Starlink.
The coming weeks and months should see the company launch more of the satellites as it has filed paperwork with the International Telecommunication Union to lift an additional 30,000 satellites.
Starlink will be facing competition in space from Amazon, which announced plans to launch about 3,200 internet satellites of its own and a California startup Astra, which plans its own mega constellation of about 13,000 satellites.
SpaceX is known for cutting costs by fishing its space hardware out of the sea for further reuse.
This month, Musk unveiled the tower that will be used to launch and catch its Mars-bound Starship rocket.
MORE : Elon Musk denies his Starlink satellites are hogging space
MORE : Elon Musk set to be world’s first trillionaire thanks to Starlink
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