SpaceX Starship Reaches Orbit on 14th Test, Deploys 26 Starlink V3 Satellites

The rocket lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at 8:49 p.m. Beijing time. About 25 minutes after liftoff, the upper stage Ship 41 fired its Raptor engines for a 19-second orbital insertion burn and entered a near-Earth orbit at an altitude of about 275 kilometers. It then released the 26 Starlink V3 satellites at a rate of about one per minute. SpaceX confirmed that all satellites were communicating normally. The mission was also the commercial debut of the Starlink V3 satellite and Starship's first commercial payload flight. The first commercial customer was SpaceX itself.

During ascent, one vacuum-version Raptor engine shut down early. SpaceX initially paused the orbital insertion decision, and some news reports had already reported that orbit insertion failed. After an engineering assessment, mission control gave the “Go for orbit” approval. The original plan called for Ship 41 to circle Earth six times over nearly 10 hours and pass over China from the third orbit. After the engine anomaly, SpaceX announced an early deorbit burn. The spacecraft flew only two orbits before making a controlled splashdown in the North Pacific.

The flight was the 14th Starship test and the third for the V3 configuration. The V3 Starship first flew in May 2026 on the 12th test. The 13th flight came 63 days later, and the 14th came 66 days after that. In the previous 13 tests, Starship reached space altitudes but remained on suborbital trajectories, with the lowest point of the flight path kept inside the atmosphere so that an uncontrolled vehicle would fall back to Earth. The 14th test broke that limit.

Each Starlink V3 satellite is designed to add about 1 Tbps of downlink capacity and 160 Gbps of uplink capacity, about 10 times and 22 times the capacity of the current V2 Mini satellites, respectively. A fully loaded Starship is expected to carry 60 V3 satellites, adding about 60 Tbps of Starlink downlink capacity per launch, 20 times the capacity added by a Falcon 9 launch today. Musk has said he hopes to eventually expand the Starlink constellation to 100,000 V3 satellites, about 100 times the current network size. SpaceX's long-term goal is for Starship to launch once per hour and place about 200 tons of payload into orbit each time. The 14th flight delivered 52 tons of payload, the third-largest launch by payload mass in history. The V3 Starship's near-Earth orbit payload limit is in the 100-ton class.

SpaceX has also announced the Starmind orbital AI computing plan, including an orbital computing satellite called AI1. According to the design, AI1 will have a wingspan of 75 meters and a height of 30 meters when deployed, with a computing load of up to 250 kW and an average of 175 kW. It would use solar power directly to supply AI chips, bypassing the electricity constraints on ground-based computing, and connect its computing results to the Starlink network through high-speed laser links. Musk claimed that if each ton of satellite can provide about 100 kW of computing power, then launching 1 million tons of satellites per year through Starship could add about 100 GW of orbital AI computing power, double SpaceX's current total computing power. The report noted that Musk has not provided solutions for ionizing radiation, maintenance, orbital congestion, or thermal management in orbit.

Eighteen years earlier, on Sept. 28, 2008, a small Falcon 1 rocket launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. SpaceX's first three rockets had failed, and the company was close to running out of money. The fourth rocket reached orbit and placed its second stage into the intended trajectory, beginning SpaceX's rise. The 21-meter Falcon 1 and its single Merlin 1C engine have since become the 124-meter Starship, with a liftoff mass of about 5,000 tons and 33 Raptor V3 engines arranged in three rings.