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Ahead of the latest Falcon 9 mission, SpaceX has conducted six launches of the operational Starlink v1.0 design, for a total of 360 satellites.
With SpaceX planning to launch another set of Starlink internet satellites on Wednesday, the company will continue the deployment of the initial constellation of approximately 1500 satellites, on the way to building their 4400 satellite Ku-/Ka-band network. //
A handful of these suffered problems on orbit, with three being actively deorbited so far and SpaceX noting in an FCC filing that six more have had propulsion problems after they began orbit raising. The current number of functional Starlink satellites for providing service to customers is around 350, not all of which have reached their operational position yet.
Each launch of 60 satellites that have been carried so far has aimed to populate three planes of 20 satellites, each plane spaced 20 degrees apart at the equator. Once they get 18 evenly spaced planes into position, they should be able to test the system with continuous service in the northern United States.
As it takes about four months for the satellites to all reach their operational positions from launch, it appears SpaceX decided to speed up the process a little by using the seventh launch on June 3 to populate the 18th plane.
Moving forward, subsequent launches will be used to create more planes in between the existing ones until there are 72 planes spaced five degrees apart.
A handful of these suffered problems on orbit, with three being actively deorbited so far and SpaceX noting in an FCC filing that six more have had propulsion problems after they began orbit raising. //