Starship has just gone where it has never gone before.
SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit today (Sept. 28), notching a huge milestone on the road to operational flight. And the launch, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, was not without high drama.
During liftoff, one of the six engines on the Starship upper stage went out, raising doubt on whether SpaceX would attempt to reach orbit after all. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot even announced it was called off, only to reverse course as flight controllers decided to press ahead.
"We are not giving up yet,' Huot said. 'We will continue to hang out ... edge of your seat."
And the call came just a few minutes later: Starship was go for orbit. About 25 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX's Ship 41 fired a single Raptor engine briefly to enter orbit. It was the primary goal of SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 launch test: Reach orbit for the first time and deploy 26 Starlink satellites into an operational orbit.
"Starship is orbital," mission control confirmed. The crowd at SpaceX's Starbase went wild. Starship still has a lot of work to do — including on its current flight, which is expected to last nearly 10 hours — but today is already a very big day for SpaceX.
"First orbital flight of Starship successful!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on SpaceX's X platform.
The rocket of the future
Starship stands 407 feet (124 meters) tall and can haul more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to Earth orbit, according to its SpaceX specs page. The rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage are both designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
SpaceX thinks this combination of power and reflight will be transformative, allowing humanity to expand its footprint into the final frontier like never before. For example, Elon Musk has repeatedly cited Starship's potential to make Mars settlement economically feasible.
NASA is invested in this vision as well. The space agency picked Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole over the next five years or so.
If all goes according to plan, Starship's Ship upper stage will fly on the crewed Artemis III mission to low Earth orbit in mid-2027 and put astronauts down near the moon's south pole a year later with Artemis IV. (According to SpaceX's plan, anyway; NASA also selected Blue Origin to supply Artemis crewed landers, and it's unclear at the moment which vehicle will fly Artemis IV.)
A busy and ambitious test flight
Starship lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas today at 8:48 a.m. EDT (1248 GMT; 7:48 a.m. local Texas time), kicking off its 14th test flight to date.
Flight 14 is the third Starship launch to feature Version 3 of the vehicle, a relatively mature iteration that's capable of deploying satellites and reaching the moon and Mars, among other tasks.
Everything has been going according to plan so far on Flight 14. Super Heavy did what it was supposed to do, coming back down to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, though it did appear to experience several engine shutdowns during flight (but nothing serious enough to affect the landing). Meanwhile, Ship continued to power its upward ascent, inserting into low Earth orbit (LEO) about a half-hour into the flight.
But SpaceX isn't content with just getting to LEO. Ship is carrying 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink V3 broadband satellites, which it's scheduled to deploy over a 30-minute stretch starting at T+34 minutes. These are the first members of a megaconstellation that will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to Musk. (Ship deployed V3 Starlinks on Flight 13 in July, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and soon fell back to Earth.)
Three of the 26 Starlinks have been outfitted with cameras, which they'll use to scan Ship. SpaceX engineers will study this imagery to see if they can improve Ship's heat shield, which allows the vehicle to survive the fiery trip down through Earth's atmosphere at the end of its missions.
Ship will keep circling Earth for a while after deploying the Starlink satellites — across another eight hours or so, if all goes to plan. The vehicle will then come home for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. This will be a new locale for Ship; its suborbital missions targeted a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia. From launch to splashdown, the mission should last about 9 hours and 50 minutes, SpaceX's longest Starship flight yet.
Even if the rest of Flight 14 goes well, SpaceX will still have some work to do to get Starship fully up and running.
For example, the company plans to bring Super Heavy and Ship down on the launch pad at the end of each mission, catching both vehicles with the launch tower's "chopstick" arms — a recovery strategy meant to make reuse quicker and more efficient. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Super Heavy on three test flights to date but has yet to try one with Ship.
And Starship missions that go to the moon or Mars will require multiple launches of "tanker" spacecraft to fuel up Ship in Earth orbit. SpaceX has not yet demonstrated off-Earth refueling, so that will be another big box to check.
SpaceX will also need to install life-support systems ahead of crewed missions like Artemis IV — and it will doubtless fly Starship successfully many times before putting an astronaut on it. So stay tuned: There will probably be a lot more Starship action in the coming weeks and months.
