SpaceX's Starship megarocket aces launch rehearsal ahead of 1st orbital test flight (video)

long-distance photo of a big silver rocket on a launch pad with white steam billowing from it — SpaceX conducts a wet dress rehearsal with its Starship megarocket on Sept. 24, 2026, keeping it on track for a planned Sept. 28 launch. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Starship just cleared a major hurdle ahead of its first orbital flight.

SpaceX announced this afternoon (Sept. 24) that it has completed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the next flight of Starship, the huge, fully reusable rocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.

During a WDR, mission teams fuel up a vehicle and go through all of the major steps they will take on launch day, without actually igniting the engines. With this key test in the books, Starship remains on track to launch Monday morning (Sept. 28) on its 14th-ever test flight, which will take the 407-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle farther than it has ever gone before.

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Watch full video here:

Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4September 24, 2026

Starship debuted in April 2023. That launch, and the next 12 that followed, all sent Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, known as Ship, on a suborbital trajectory.

On Flight 14, however, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will go fast enough to enter orbit. Once up there, it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first members of a constellation that Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Ship will stay up for a while, if all goes to plan; it will circle Earth six times before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. (That splashdown zone is new as well; previous Starship flights targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.)

Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, will make a splashdown of its own in the Gulf of Mexico. This will occur about seven minutes after launch.

That will not be the end game on operational Starship flights, however. SpaceX wants to catch both Ship and Super Heavy back at the pad, using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this with Super Heavy on three previous flights but has not yet tried to do so with Ship.

drone photo looking down at a big silver rocket on a launch pad — A view of the WDR from above. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Starship Flight 14 is scheduled to launch from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time).

You can watch all the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX. And there should be a lot to watch: The company has said it aims to keep the stream going for all six of Ship's orbits around Earth and its splashdown.

Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.