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An Indian rocket launched the record-breaking BlueBird 6 smartphone satellite to orbit on Tuesday night (Dec. 23).
BlueBird 6, built by Texas company AST SpaceMobile, lifted off atop an LVM3 rocket from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre Tuesday at 10:25 p.m. EST (0325 GMT and 8:55 a.m. India Standard Time on Dec. 24).
The LVM3 deployed BlueBird 6 about 324 miles (521 kilometers) above Earth 15.5 minutes after launch as planned.
AST SpaceMobile is building a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that beam broadband service directly to standard smartphones on the ground.
The company has now launched six operational satellites to orbit, five of them aboard a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in September 2024. Those previous spacecraft, BlueBirds 1 through 5, feature 693-square-foot (64.4 square meters) communication arrays — the largest ever unfurled in LEO.
BlueBird 6 will break that record, and by a healthy margin. It's the first of AST SpaceMobile's next-generation BlueBirds, whose arrays cover nearly 2,400 square feet (223 square meters) apiece.
Tuesday's liftoff was the ninth overall for the three-stage, 143-foot-tall (43.5 m) LVM3, which is India's most powerful rocket. It debuted in December 2014 and has a 100% success rate to date.
BlueBird 6, which tips the scales at about 13,450 pounds (6,100 kilograms), was the heaviest payload that the LVM3 has ever hauled to LEO, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 11 p.m. ET on Dec. 23 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.
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