Starship Reaches Orbit for First Time on Flight 14

SpaceX's Starship achieved its first orbital flight on its 14th launch, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites before an early Pacific splashdown.

SpaceX launched Starship and the Super Heavy booster from its Starbase site in Texas on the morning of September 28, and for the first time in 14 full-scale flights, the upper stage made it to orbit. Mission control's callout — "Insertion. Starship is orbital" — drew cheers from employees watching the livestream. The previous 13 flights all flew suborbital trajectories, meaning the milestone required only a marginal extra boost, but it was the one the program had chased for years. SpaceX commentator Dan Hout called it a "huge milestone" the team had been working toward for a couple of years.

The orbital attempt almost didn't happen. One of Starship's six Raptor engines shut down prematurely during the initial climb, forcing teams to weigh whether the upper stage could still make the final boost into orbit. SpaceX later said the shortened flight was "out of an abundance of caution."

Despite the early return, the flight delivered the first meaningful payload in Starship's history: 26 of the largest, most advanced Starlink V3 satellites ever made, released one by one within about 30 minutes of the first deployment, with contact made with all 26 soon after. The satellites joined a constellation of about 11,000 older models.

The original plan called for six orbits and nearly 10 hours of flight, ending in a Pacific splashdown off Chile. Instead, controllers brought Starship home after about two laps and three hours, targeting the northern Pacific near Hawaii. Drone cameras captured the descent as the vehicle hovered over the ocean, tipped over, and erupted in a fireball — which Hout noted has become a standard ending for these test flights, though the Flight 13 ship actually survived its tip-over and is being towed back to Texas.

The 407-foot rocket is now officially the most powerful rocket ever to reach orbit, taking the title from NASA's Space Launch System, with its 33 Raptor engines producing nearly 17 million pounds of thrust — almost double the SLS. The milestone is also vital to NASA's Artemis program: Starship is earmarked to ferry astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon's surface, and it must demonstrate orbital refueling with another Starship before Artemis III. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on reaching orbit "in a safe, responsible and especially inspirational way."

SpaceX wants Starship certified for orbital flight, a step toward Moon and Mars missions, and is building a second launch tower at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39-A for future operational launches. The booster was not recovered this time; instead of the three previous tower catches, it made a controlled landing over water in the Gulf of Mexico.