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March 19 (UPI) -- Elon Musk's SpaceX launched 53 Starlink satellites from Florida early Saturday morning after the launch was postponed Friday night because of stormy weather. The launch, which came days after the company celebrated its 20th anniversary, was pushed back to 12:42 a.m. EDT when stormy weather near Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station had cleared.
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The spacecraft was initially scheduled to launch from a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:23 p.m. EDT but it was delayed "due to unfavorable weather," the company said in a statement. Within half an hour of the new launch time, forecasts showed that the weather was 70% favorable for liftoff.
If the Falcon 9 rocket was not able to lift off, the launch would have been delayed to a new window on Saturday night, SpaceX said.
The company said in a statement about 10 minutes after the launch that the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket had landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which is a modified barge that has a large platform that allows SpaceX to land its rocket boosters.
It was the 12th time that the booster had launched after having previously boosted eight Starlink missions, the SpaceX Demo-1 uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station, the launch of Canadian RADARSAT spacecraft and the Sirius SXM-7 satellite, the company said in a press release.
The launch came after Musk sent multiple shipments of Starlink user terminals to Ukraine to provide the country with satellite Internet access amid the Russian invasion.
