CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Elon Musk‘s SpaceX rocket company launched the 15th batch of satellites for its orbital broadband service from the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, Florida, this past weekend.
It follows a similar launch a week earlier, as Musk’s company aims to get more satellites for its Starlink service into orbit.
“With performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable,” according to the company’s website. “Starlink is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.”
Video of the latest launch to help build the service was shared by the National Park Service’s Canaveral National Seashore and showed the unmanned rocket taking off from the park’s beach. The footage shows the vehicle powering skyward before hitting the cloud cover. It is then briefly visible again before disappearing into the sky and creating a cloud trail of its own.
Given the launch’s proximity to Halloween, a fake skeleton can also be seen leaning against a traffic cone describing the scene as a “launch to die for.”
“Today was a great launch… Visitors had a spooktacular day at the beach!” the park service’s post on the event noted.
SpaceX’s next launch at Cape Canaveral is set for mid-November, according to the Kennedy Space Center’s schedule. That mission will mark the beginning of regular flights of astronauts from the United States to the International Space Station (ISS) via SpaceX’s Crew Dragon reusable spacecraft. Slated to be on board are NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
(Edited by Matthew Hall and Carlin Becker)
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