SpaceX’s Starship has reached Earth orbit for the first time. The giant rocket lifted off from Starbase in South Texas on the morning of Monday, September 28, US time, on its 14th test flight, and after a tense few minutes the upper stage completed the burn that put it into orbit, according to SpaceX’s official livestream. Every previous Starship flight had followed a suborbital path, so this one marks the point where the world’s largest rocket starts to become an operational vehicle.
It did not go entirely to plan. Shortly after the Ship separated from the Super Heavy booster, it lost one of its six Raptor engines. Starship is designed to reach orbit even with an engine out, but SpaceX initially called off the orbital attempt before reversing course a few minutes later and pressing ahead with the insertion burn.
The caution has a long history. The previous 13 flights were kept deliberately suborbital so that a 52 metre, roughly 160 tonne vehicle could never be left stranded in orbit without control, as NASASpaceFlight explained ahead of launch. Those flights let SpaceX refine the booster, the ship and its heatshield step by step. For this mission the Federal Aviation Administration issued a licence that separately covers reentry from orbit, and it applies to Flight 14 only, so SpaceX will need fresh approval for the flights that follow.
The flight also carried Starship’s first operational cargo: 26 third generation Starlink V3 satellites, the first of a larger, higher capacity design. SpaceX’s livestream on its website and X account showed the ship beginning to deploy the batch after reaching orbit. NASASpaceFlight notes that those 26 satellites carry roughly 10 times the capacity of a single Falcon 9 launch of the older Starlink V2 Mini design, and CNN reported they could start serving customers within weeks. Three of them carry cameras aimed back at the ship, giving engineers a new outside view of Starship’s heatshield tiles.
Down below, the Super Heavy booster returned toward the Gulf coast and performed a simulated landing over the water rather than a catch at the launch tower. TechCrunch described it as the cleanest simulated landing yet for the V3 version of Starship, which began testing in May. SpaceX skipped a catch attempt this time after its two previous boosters ran into trouble on their return, and it wants clean flights before going back to catches and moving toward reusing boosters.
The mission plan called for the ship to circle Earth about six times over roughly nine hours before firing a single Raptor to deorbit and attempting a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. SpaceX built in an earlier exit near Hawaii if checks after deployment turned up problems. It was not immediately clear whether the engine loss changed that timeline, and the reentry and splashdown were still to be confirmed at the time of writing.
Reaching orbit changes what Starship can be used for. The rocket sits at the centre of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon, of SpaceX’s expansion of Starlink, and of Elon Musk’s more ambitious ideas, including putting AI data centres in space. Speaking earlier this month, Musk said it was “extremely likely that we will achieve full reusability”, with rapid reflight, in 2027.
That is the next and harder test. Flight 14 shows Starship can get to orbit and deliver a payload; the goal now is to do it repeatedly and cheaply. The sequence ahead runs from catching the booster, to flying the ship itself back to the tower, to launching the same hardware again within days. Every flight that delivers working satellites moves Starship further from test programme toward workhorse, and the images from those heatshield cameras will help decide how soon a ship can come home in one piece and fly again.
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