SpaceX is preparing to launch its first Falcon 9 rocket of the month and its first Starlink flight since reportedly reaching 5 million subscribers for the satellite internet service.

Liftoff of the Starlink 12-20 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is set for 9:24 p.m. EST (0224 UTC). This will be SpaceX’s 26th Falcon 9 rocket launch of the year.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.

SpaceX will use the Falcon 9 first stage booster, tail number B1086, to launch the mission. It will fly for a fifth time after launching as a side booster on the Falcon Heavy GOES-U mission and then as a Falcon 9 booster for the third pair of Maxar’s WorldView Legion satellites and two Starlink missions.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1086 will target a landing on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ If successful, this will be the 112th booster landing on JRTI and the 415th booster landing to date.

Among the 21 Starlink satellites on board, there are 13 that feature Direct to Cell capabilities. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 500 of these DTC capable satellites.

Starlink published a short video to its X account, marking the 5 million subscriber milestone, but the video visible now wasn’t the original. The first version of the video published included an image at the 39-second mark, which some speculated was an image of two Starshield satellites, the government variant of Starlink.

All of the missions for the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferated architecture constellation, which are reportedly populated by these Starshield satellites, feature launch broadcasts that intentionally don’t show the moment of satellite deployment.

If the two satellites in the now removed video are Starshield, it would be the first known released images of these satellites. SpaceX has not issued a statement on the reason it took down the original video or why it swapped out that image for a clip of Starlink satellite deployment.

Launch delays

Meanwhile, at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SpaceX is still working through an unspecified issue connected to the Falcon 9 rocket set to launch NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH spacecraft.

The mission was originally scheduled to launch February 27, but has now been delayed three times because of the rocket.

In its latest blog update, NASA announced the mission would launch no earlier than Tuesday, March 4. The agency stated that “teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data.”

SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) will conduct an all-sky spectral survey of the sky over a planned two-year mission. PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) is a collection of four satellites the will create “3D observations of the entire inner heliosphere to learn how the Sun’s corona becomes the solar wind,” according to NASA.