Starship Flight 14 Aims for First Orbit on Monday

SpaceX cleared a wet dress rehearsal and is set to attempt Starship's first orbital flight Monday, flying six orbits over ten hours.

SpaceX has stacked Starship 14 at Starbase in South Texas and completed a full wet dress rehearsal on Thursday, loading the vehicle with liquid propellant and running the entire countdown — including scrub procedures and fuel offload simulations — without igniting the engines. The company announced "launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14" on X. Liftoff is targeted for Monday, September 28, pending FAA regulatory approval, with the day's launch window running until roughly 8:30 a.m. local time, per Houston Public Media.

This will be the vehicle's first orbital flight after thirteen full-scale tests in roughly three and a half years, all suborbital. Starship is slated to fly at about 170 miles altitude, circle Earth six times over ten hours, then reenter and splash down in the Pacific west of Chile. Futurism calls it arguably the most important launch in SpaceX's history: proving orbital endurance and a controlled reentry is mission-critical if Starship is ever to deliver satellites at a regular cadence, and it underpins NASA's lunar lander plans.

About 30 minutes into the flight, shortly after reaching orbit, Starship will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites — the first next-generation models added to SpaceX's satellite internet constellation, which the company says will greatly expand network capacity and user speeds. Houston Public Media notes this is the first mission to fully deploy operational Starlink satellites, following July's Flight 13, which demonstrated the deployment capability. SpaceX is preparing to wind down Falcon 9 in favor of Starship, which can theoretically carry roughly ten times as many satellites per launch, according to Futurism.

The push for a clean flight follows a rough July. On the thirteenth test, Starship successfully deployed 20 operational satellites, but only ten of the Super Heavy booster's 13 Raptor engines relit during landing, causing a hard impact and an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX says it has made hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines, plus software changes to enhance relight reliability, aiming for a controlled booster splashdown in the Gulf this time.

Reentry remains the hardest test of the ten-hour mission, so Starship will fly an upgraded heatshield to survive the descent over the Pacific. In a notable first, Futurism reports the company will even fly two heatshield tiles recovered from the previous test launch — which it describes as the first tile reuse for Starship. Sticking both a booster landing and a spacecraft splashdown in one flight would be the clearest signal yet that the fully reusable stack actually works as designed.

NASA has contracted SpaceX for more than $4 billion, per the agency's Office of Inspector General as cited by Houston Public Media, to build the lunar lander for Artemis. Artemis III was refocused to test Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon landers in low Earth orbit, with Artemis IV expected in early 2028 using whichever lander is most capable. A successful orbital flight Monday could also accelerate Starship's first launch from Kennedy Space Center, which SpaceX is still targeting before year's end, and clear the way for future Florida Starlink missions. The flight streams on SpaceX's X account, with coverage beginning before the window opens.