Construction of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink satellite megaconstellation is officially underway.
The milestone occurred today (Sept. 28), during the 14th test flight of the company's Starship megarocket. The 407-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14 — and it did something productive while it was up there.
Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, successfully delivered 26 of SpaceX's Starlink Version 3 (V3) Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) today. And we got great views of the deployment, from cameras aboard Ship and on the satellites.
SpaceX currently operates more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO — by far the largest spacecraft network ever assembled. But the Starlink V3 megaconstellation will be a completely different animal.
For starters, Starlink V3 satellites are about twice as heavy as their predecessors, tipping the scales here on Earth at roughly 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms). They can fly efficiently only on the ultrapowerful Starship; they're too big to launch aboard SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which built the original Starlink constellation.
The new Starlinks are also far more capable.
"The Starlink V3 satellite is designed to support 1 Tbps [terabytes per second] of downlink and 160 Gbps [gigabytes per second] of uplink capacity. That's an ~10x improvement in downlink capacity and an ~22x increase in uplink capacity from the Starlink V2 satellite," SpaceX representatives wrote in a description of the technology.
"The V3 satellite's antennas support both 2,048 downlink and uplink beams," they added. "For comparison, Starlink V2 satellite's phased arrays supported 192 downlink and 144 uplink beams."
Thanks to these and other enhancements, "we'll be able to deploy ~20x the capacity per Starship launch into the constellation as compared to a Falcon 9 launch of V2 satellites," SpaceX wrote.
And there will be a lot of Starship Starlink launches in the coming months and years, if all goes according to plan.
The Starlink V3 constellation will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. Starship can carry up about 60 Starlink V3s on each mission, so just getting to 100,000 will require nearly 1,700 liftoffs. More will be needed to maintain the constellation, of course; Starlink satellites have an operational lifetime of about five years, so they'll have to be replaced regularly.
But Starship could fly even more frequently in service of another megaconstellation — one that's bigger by an order of magnitude. SpaceX intends to operate a million of its "Starmind" AI data centers in Earth orbit, and all of them will ride on Starship's back.
Indeed, SpaceX aims to launch Starship 10,000 times per year by 2030, Musk has said — an outrageous cadence that the company thinks is possible because the vehicle is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. For perspective: the Falcon 9 flew 165 times in 2025, which was a company record and represented half of all orbital missions worldwide for that year.
SpaceX took a big step toward meeting those ambitious goals with today's success, but Starship still has some boxes to check. For example, missions to the moon and Mars — which are definitely in the cards, according to SpaceX — will require Ship to be fueled up in Earth orbit, something that the company has not yet demonstrated.
And Ship will start carrying humans into the final frontier in the near future, if all goes to plan. So SpaceX will need to install a life-support system in Ship, and launch some test flights to demonstrate that it works.
SpaceX has considerable experience in this regard, having flown 20 astronaut missions aboard its Crew Dragon capsule to date. But Starship and Dragon, which generally carries just four people per flight, are very different vehicles, so some scale-up will be required.
