Starship just notched a huge milestone, but it needs to check a few more boxes to get fully up and running.
The SpaceX megarocket — the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built — reached orbit for the first time ever on Monday (Sept. 28), during its 14th test flight to date. Starship also deployed 26 of SpaceX's Starlink V3 broadband satellites on Flight 14, kicking off construction of a constellation that will eventually harbor 100,000 spacecraft, if all goes to plan.
These were big successes, but they didn't vault Starship into full technological maturity; the rocket will have to clear a few more hurdles to get there. Here's a brief rundown of the most important ones.
Catching the Ship upper stage
Both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both of these vehicles back to the launch pad, where they will be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms.
SpaceX thinks this recovery strategy will enable fast and efficient reuse, allowing the company to achieve seemingly outrageous launch cadences. Indeed, the company is targeting 10,000 Starship liftoffs per year by 2030, Elon Musk has said.
SpaceX has already pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy, doing so on three Starship test flights to date. But the company has yet to attempt one with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Ship, which has always targeted an ocean splashdown to wrap up its missions.
That could change very soon. During an appearance at the All-In Summit on Sept. 14, Musk said that SpaceX may try to catch Ship on Flight 15, provided that Flight 14 went well.
The company has not laid out a mission profile for Flight 15, but Monday's success would seem to keep a Ship catch in play. We don't have an official launch date for the upcoming mission, either, but provisional planning documents peg Oct. 19 as the earliest possible target.
And another note about that launch cadence: SpaceX aims to achieve it by expanding launch operations of Starship, which has previously flown from just two pads at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX is currently building three Starship pads on Florida's Space Coast, and it plans to break ground on the $100 billion, 12-pad Starship Louisiana complex in 2027. So that work will be going in the background of each upcoming Starship flight.
Off-Earth propellant transfer
Most Starship missions will stay in Earth orbit, deploying satellites for the Starlink V3 constellation and the company's even bigger "Starmind" data center network, which will consist of about a million satellites, if all goes to plan.
But some of the megarocket launches will send Ship farther afield — to the moon and Mars, for example. Indeed, NASA picked Starship's upper stage 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 decade or so.
Deep-space Starship missions will be more complicated than orbital ones, because they require more propellant. Ship cannot launch with much fuel onboard — doing so would make it too heavy — so each Ship bound for the moon or Mars will need to visit an off-Earth fuel depot, which itself will be a Ship variant.
This depot will need to be fueled up by special Ship "tanker" vehicles. It's unclear how many tanker flights will be required for each deep-space Ship mission, but the number is not negligible. For example, estimates for a Ship lunar-landing campaign range from eight tanker missions on the low end to 15 or 20 on the high end.
So in-space fueling is a key capability that Starship must demonstrate. SpaceX has taken some baby steps to this end already, successfully transferring propellant from one internal tank to another on Ship during Flight 3 back in March 2024.
But the company has not yet moved propellant from one vehicle to another in space. SpaceX may decide to try this as soon as Flight 15, but that's just speculation; we need to wait for an official mission description.
Getting Starship ready for astronauts
Starship was always envisioned to be a crew-carrying spacecraft. When Musk introduced it to the world back in September 2016, he framed the megarocket — then known as the Interplanetary Transport System — as the key breakthrough that would make Mars settlement feasible.
So SpaceX will need to incorporate a suite of life-support technologies into Starship and test them extensively before putting any people on board. And the clock is ticking on this task, thanks to the timeline that NASA has laid out for Artemis.
The agency plans to launch the crewed Artemis III mission in mid-2027, sending its Orion crew capsule to dock with Ship in Earth orbit. It's unclear if Ship will need to be crew-capable by then — the Artemis III astronauts may not enter Ship — but it will definitely have to be people-friendly by the time Artemis IV rolls around in 2028. That mission will land astronauts near the lunar south pole, in the first crewed moon touchdown since Apollo 17 in 1972.
And the timeline isn't the only driver for SpaceX. There's also competition for these flights; NASA has said it may fly Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander on Artemis III and/or Artemis IV if Ship isn't ready.
SpaceX won't be starting from scratch with its life-support tech; it can (and probably already has begun to) scale up the systems it has used on its Crew Dragon capsule, which has flown 20 astronaut missions to low Earth orbit to date.
As this partial list shows, the next few Starship missions should be just as exciting as Flight 14, if not more so. There will likely be a lot riding on each one.
