There’s a lot riding on SpaceX’s next Starship launch, both physically and conceptually, as the company prepares the giant rocket for its most consequential test flight to date.
SpaceX is targeting Sept. 28 for Starship’s Flight 14, the next liftoff of its industry-shaking launch vehicle, and is planning to fly the towering spacecraft farther and longer than it has ever flown, with a very specific destination in mind: orbit. Of the baker’s-dozen launches so far under its belt, Starship has only ever flown suborbitally. Succeeding in its first orbital endeavor will serve as a huge milestone for the rocket, which is still in development.
Liftoff on Sept. 28 is scheduled during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT). With orbit as the goal, the mission is expected to last much longer than previous Starship launches — about 10 hours from liftoff to splashdown of the rocket’s Ship upper stage, compared to past suborbital flights that have each only lasted about an hour. Rather than its previous arching trajectories above the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, Starship will soar to an altitude of approximately 170 miles (275 kilometers), where it will circle the planet around six times before executing a deorbit burn to initiate its return.
SpaceX is taking the opportunity to load Starship with a stack of 26 operational Starlink Version 3 (V3) satellites for deployment in low Earth orbit (LEO). This batch will be the first of more than 100,000 upgraded Starlink spacecraft designed to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services. SpaceX has deployed sets of Starlink V3 test payloads on previous Starship launches, but due to their suborbital trajectory, all of them quickly came back down to Earth. Three of the V3 Starlinks going up on Flight 14 are equipped with cameras for peering back at Starship after their deployment to inspect the spacecraft’s heat-shield tiles — an essential component to the success of Starship’s ultimate purpose.
SpaceX is designing Starship as the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicle — what the company calls “The Holy Grail of Rocketry” (which is also the title of SpaceX’s latest documentary-style episode chronicling the rocket’s development). Starship’s Super Heavy first-stage booster and Ship upper stage are being designed with the capability to perform deceleration and landing burns for a return to their launch site, where they will be caught mid-air using massive chopstick-like arms on a pair of adjacent “Mechazilla” launch towers for refurbishment and reflight.
As the company has worked toward that goal, it has crossed several milestones off Starship’s list of technical feats needed to realize the rocket’s eventual rapid reusability. For example, SpaceX has made three successful catches of Super Heavy back at SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas, launch facility, and has executed a handful of Raptor 3 single-engine relights on Ship while in space.
SpaceX hasn’t attempted a Super Heavy return to launch site and catch since introducing the most recent Starship design upgrade, Version 3, which lifted off for the first time on Flight 12 in May. None of Starship’s launches have yet attempted a return and catch of the rocket’s Ship upper stage. Instead, the two Starship V3 vehicles that have launched this year targeted soft splashdowns at sea for Ship and Super Heavy, in order to fine-tune landing burn procedures without risking damage to the major launch infrastructure at Starbase. That will be the case for Flight 14 as well.
SpaceX has made “several modifications” to Super Heavy’s hardware to address issues discovered during previous flights, according to the company's Flight 14 mission page, and will send at least one more of the Starship boosters to a watery grave to ensure those modifications are all working as expected. Flight 14's Super Heavy (Booster 21, for those keeping track) will follow a similar trajectory to its previous flights, with its primary objectives after stage separation being a successful boostback burn, followed by a landing burn and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Ship (Ship 41, if you’re counting), on the other hand, will fly a very new mission compared to its previous jaunts in space. Its initial trajectory after stage separation will put the spacecraft on the same course as previous flights, arching toward a reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. But it will then head for orbit, if all systems are “go.” SpaceX clarified its criteria for entering orbit on the Flight 14 page, stating, “Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission.”
Approximately 25 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft will fire one or more of its three vacuum-optimized Raptor 3 engines for an orbital insertion maneuver, which is expected to last only about 20 seconds. SpaceX has included splashdown contingency locations in case the need for an early deorbit arises, and plans to be “intentionally conservative” in its abort criteria to ensure flight safety. Should that phase of flight execute nominally, however, SpaceX has slated the half-hour-long Starlink deployment procedure to begin about 10 minutes later. Then the coast phase of the mission will begin.
SpaceX is planning for Starship to complete six orbits of Earth over the course of about eight hours, during which the company hopes to stream live views of the planet from Ship’s onboard cameras. At the end of its coast phase, the spacecraft will fire a single-engine deorbit burn using one of its sea-level Raptor 3s for a targeted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, wrapping up the Flight 14 mission approximately 10 hours after launch.
Orbit is a big step for Starship, provided SpaceX can pull it off. If the Flight 14 launch date remains on Sept. 28, it will mark exactly 10 years and one day from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s initial unveiling of the company’s Starship design (then dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System, or ITS) at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016.
Since then, the ambitious launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful in history, has undergone a decade of modifications, ground tests and increasingly complex launch profiles, with progress marked by a mixture of achievements and setbacks along the way. But the pressure to get Starship operational is mounting.
NASA is counting on a lunar lander version of the vehicle for its Artemis program architecture, which includes an uncrewed article for docking tests in Earth orbit with NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Artemis III crew in mid-2027, and a crewed lunar landing mission in 2028 on Artemis IV. SpaceX is also eager for Starship’s massive payload capacity to begin deploying its much larger Starlink V3s at scale and, eventually, help assemble an even larger constellation of orbital AI data centers that Musk envisions. That constellation will consist of a million spacecraft, if SpaceX gets regulatory approval.
Still, Starship has more feats to master before it can pull off all SpaceX has billed it for. At 407 feet tall (124 meters), Starship V3's Super Heavy is powered by 33 Raptor 3s, which provide about 18.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — enough to deliver up to 100 tons to orbit. SpaceX says that later Starship generations are being designed to double that payload capacity to around 200 tons. But realizing those design goals is contingent on SpaceX’s ability to mature Starship much further.
For Starship to follow through on SpaceX’s promises, the company still needs to tackle technological hurdles like on-orbit fuel transfers and long-term cryogenic propellant storage in space, both of which Starship needs in order to fly beyond LEO. On Artemis IV, for example, NASA estimates the Starship lunar lander will need up to a dozen refueling launches to top off its tanks enough to carry out its mission of delivering astronauts to the surface of the moon, where it's expected to remain for up to a week before then launching its crew back to lunar orbit to rendezvous with Orion.
Those capabilities, though, lie farther (but presumably not too far) down Starship’s developmental timeline. Orbit is Flight 14’s primary focus, and only by achieving that milestone can SpaceX move on to clear the rocket’s remaining hurdles.
