Starship's First Orbit: Flight 14 Slips to Sept. 28

SpaceX pushed its first-ever orbital Starship test to Sept. 28 pending FCC approval, a nearly 10-hour, six-orbit flight carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites.

SpaceX confirmed this week that the 14th Starship test flight will be its first attempt to send the vehicle into orbit, after 13 suborbital flights since April 2023. The company initially targeted Sept. 22, but on Sept. 18 it backed off to Sept. 28, with Aviation Week reporting the delay came as approval from the FCC remains pending. If cleared, liftoff from Starbase, Texas would take place within a 75-minute window opening at 12:15 UTC. The uncrewed stack stands about 407 feet (124 meters) tall.

The mission profile is unlike anything Starship has flown. The Super Heavy booster will separate, perform a boostback burn, and make a controlled landing splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the upper stage fires an orbital insertion maneuver — its first — to reach roughly 275 km (171 miles). It will deploy 26 larger Starlink V3 satellites, complete about six orbits over nearly 10 hours, then execute a deorbit burn on one Raptor engine before reentry and a Pacific splashdown west of Chile. Previous flights used suborbital trajectories; SpaceX says going to orbit opens the next phase of development toward full, rapid reusability.

Flight 14 carries several firsts for devoted watchers. It will be the first operational deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, each adding 1 terabit per second of capacity for 26 Tbps total, and two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will be reflown on Ship 41 — the first tile reuse in Starship history, SpaceX says. Three satellites carry cameras to image the heat shield after deployment. Flight 13's Indian Ocean splashdown, where the ship floated for days, let engineers study tile loss; improvements include new retention mechanisms, sealed flow paths behind tiles, and curved tile designs that reduce gap heating.

Despite the milestone, SpaceX is not stacking every objective into one flight. There is no planned tower catch of the Starship upper stage — recovery will be by splashdown — and orbital propellant transfer, a key technology for future Moon and Mars missions, is not a primary demonstration. Flight 13 in July did reach several useful results, deploying 20 Starlink V3 satellites and surviving controlled reentry and splashdown, but did not reach orbit, and its Super Heavy booster was not recovered. The company is deliberately testing components one mission at a time.

The flight matters far beyond SpaceX. Starship is being developed as NASA's Human Landing System for the Artemis program; NASA's evolving plans call for Artemis III in 2027 as an Earth-orbit demonstration and the first crewed lunar South Pole landing with Artemis IV in 2028. Reaching orbit would demonstrate sustained orbital flight, satellite deployment, heat-shield performance, and controlled reentry — the data set engineers need before reusable operations begin. For Musk, it is a step toward the Mars ambitions, though a successful orbital flight alone would not make Mars missions ready.

The immediate gate is regulatory: Aviation Week reports the launch was pushed six days because FCC approval is still pending, and Ars Technica's Rocket Report notes new notices to mariners indicated the target had slipped to Sept. 28. Analysts also see commercial weight in the outcome — Raymond James's $800 price target for SpaceX assumes Starship dramatically cuts launch costs, though the outlet's own writer called that target 'a bit rich' in the short term.