Feb 23, 2018
SpaceX launched again on Thursday – this time to put a Spanish radar satellite above the Earth.
But there was a lot of interest also in the mission’s secondary payloads – a couple of spacecraft the Californian rocket company will use to trial the delivery of broadband from orbit.
SpaceX has big plans in this area.
By sometime in the mid-2020s, it hopes to be operating more than 4,000 such satellites, linking every corner of Earth to the internet.
Wednesday’s flight was the first for SpaceX since the dramatic debut on 6 February of its Falcon Heavy – the world’s most powerful launcher.
This time, it was the turn of the smaller workhorse, the Falcon-9.
It lifted clear of the Vandenberg Air Force Base on the US Pacific west coast at exactly 06:17 (14:17 GMT).
