SpaceX’s reusable rocket, Starship – the tallest and most powerful ever launched – will orbit Earth for the first time within days. And because it will also release working Starlink V3 satellites, it will be the first commercially useful Starship mission. The company has announced that a launch window will open at 7.15am CDT (1.15pm BST) on 22nd September, during which Starship will launch from the company’s Starbase site in Texas.
The flight – Starship’s 14th – will reach an altitude of 275 kilometres and complete six orbits of Earth over 10 hours, with re-entry and splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean, to the west of Chile. SpaceX’s 1 million satellites could avoid environmental checks This will make it by far the longest and most ambitious test flight of Starship to date. All 13 previous Starship test flights have been, at best, sub-orbital.
Starship is made up of two parts: an upper stage, confusingly also called Starship, and a lower stage, called Super Heavy. Currently, SpaceX is testing the latest third generation of each section using a fail-fast, learn-fast strategy more common to Silicon Valley than the conservative world of space exploration. SpaceX is several years into its development programme for Starship, intended to be a rapidly reusable and extremely powerful launch vehicle that will take over the rollout of the company’s Starlink satellites and be a central part of NASA’s Artemis moon missions.
The 14th flight will also see 26 Starlink V3 satellites launched for the first time. Thousands of these new devices will join the existing constellation of satellites that provides internet connections around the world. Until now, Starship test flights have launched only dummy test satellites.
Davide Amato at Imperial College London says that an orbital test is indicative of confidence within the company that the rocket will at least survive the journey to orbit and the release of satellites. But he says that re-entry, where the company has faced problems during recent tests, may be another matter. Not only will the release of V3 satellites help the company update its Starlink constellation – the new satellites fly in a lower orbit than existing Starlink satellites and have higher data capacity – but their larger size than previous models will go some way to showing whether Starship is up to the task of launching its proposed Starmind data centre spacecraft, which are substantially larger.
During the 13th test flight, the booster stage made its ascent as planned, but during descent only eight of the 13 engines intended to slow its fall reignited, causing it to make a hard splashdown into the ocean rather than the planned gentle simulated landing on water. Neither the booster nor upper stage will attempt to make a controlled landing on the 14th flight. Only two Starship flights have taken place so far in 2026, with flight 14 due to be the third.
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