We now have a launch date for Starship’s most bold mission so far.
SpaceX introduced right this moment (Sept. 15) that it is focusing on Sept. 22 for the primary orbital flight of Starship, the totally reusable megarocket that the corporate is growing to assist humanity settle the moon, Mars and extra.
Liftoff, from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.
The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Starship, which debuted in April 2023 and has flown twice so far in 2026. But the 408-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle’s first 13 jaunts were all suborbital, so Flight 14 will be a landmark.
“By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 14 mission description.
“This may even mark the primary time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that may dramatically broaden connectivity speeds and reliability world wide,” the corporate added.
Starlink, SpaceX’s community of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit, at present consists of greater than 11,000 energetic spacecraft. None of these are the bigger, extra succesful V3 model, that are designed to launch on Starship.
Flight 14 will carry up 26 of those next-gen craft — the primary of many, if all goes to plan. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has mentioned the corporate needs the Starlink megaconstellation to ultimately encompass 100,000 V3 satellites.
Three of the Starlink craft launching on Flight 14 have been outfitted with cameras and can {photograph} the warmth defend on Starship’s higher stage, often called Ship, after deployment. SpaceX will use this imagery to check and probably enhance the warmth defend, which protects Ship throughout its return journey via Earth’s ambiance.
If all goes in line with plan on Sept. 22, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) Ship will full six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers). The car will then maneuver its option to a splashdown within the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote within the mission description.
That is a really completely different plan than earlier Starship flights. On these suborbital missions, Ship stayed aloft for simply 65 minutes or so, didn’t full an orbit of Earth and got here down within the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.
However Flight 14 will probably be extra of the identical for Starship’s first-stage booster, often called Tremendous Heavy. If all goes to plan, the large rocket will splash down within the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff, because it has completed on various earlier flights.
So there will probably be no catch — of both Ship or Tremendous Heavy — by the “chopstick” arms of Starbase’s launch tower on Flight 14. SpaceX has pulled off tower catches of Tremendous Heavy on three events so far however has by no means completed so with Ship. This restoration technique will ultimately be the norm on Starship flights, resulting in quicker and extra environment friendly reuse of the car, Musk has mentioned.
So, whereas Flight 14 goals to test a really large field — reaching orbit — different milestones will probably be reserved for future flights. A Ship tower catch will probably be among the many most anticipated, together with refueling the car in orbit, one thing that will probably be required for missions to the moon, Mars and past.