Starship Finally Reached Orbit, Then Came Home Seven Hours Early

Thirteen Starship flights stayed on suborbital paths. The fourteenth went into orbit. It also gave up most of its schedule. On September 28, Ship 41 left Starbase, Texas, at 8:48 a.m. EDT, lost one of its three vacuum engines about ten minutes later, made orbit anyway, released 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and splashed down north of Hawaii 3 hours and 8 minutes after liftoff. The plan had called for about ten hours, roughly six orbits, and a splashdown west of Chile.

SpaceX calls it a success, and by its own scorecard it was one. ABC News reported that the company named two primary objectives, reaching orbit and adding satellites to the Starlink constellation, and Flight 14 did both. It was also the first Starship flight to carry a payload that earns money. Eleven days on, SpaceX still hasn't said why the engine shut down.

Ten minutes of not going to orbit

The decision to go for orbit was not automatic. According to Astronomy, one of the ship's three Raptor Vacuum engines shut down early about ten minutes after launch. Flight controllers first called off the orbital insertion burn, because a ship that reaches orbit has to be able to leave it, and losing an engine raised that question. After about ten minutes of analysis they decided the engines the ship needed for its deorbit burn were healthy, and gave the go for orbit at T+21:53.

A SpaceX post about the flight, quoted on X by Sawyer Merritt, said Starship still reached its planned trajectory by burning its five remaining engines longer than planned. That trajectory is the passively safe path SpaceX has flown before: a ship that loses power on it comes back down without help. The insertion burn moved the ship from that path into a low orbit of roughly 262 by 275 kilometers at 30.5 degrees inclination, according to Wikipedia's flight record.

The booster had its own problems. Astronomy reported that Super Heavy Booster 21 lost one of its 33 Raptors about a minute into flight and did not relight all of its engines for the boostback burn. ABC News described issues with two booster engines. Booster 21 still flew its landing burn and made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, as planned. SpaceX has said more details will follow.

Twenty-six satellites that stay up

Deployment began about half an hour into the flight. All 26 Starlink V3 satellites left the ship, and Astronomy reported that SpaceX made contact with every one. ABC News noted that this is the first time Starship has put Starlink satellites in orbit for ongoing use. Earlier flights carried mass simulators, or satellites on trajectories that ended in the atmosphere. When Flight 13 deployed 20 V3s in July, that ship was still on a suborbital path.

The economics are the reason SpaceX is in a hurry. Each V3 adds about 1 terabit per second of network capacity, according to Astronomy, and future Starships are expected to carry about 60 at a time. The V3s ride on Starship, so the constellation upgrade moves only as fast as Starship flies.

Three of the 26 satellites had a second job. Wikipedia's flight record and Science Times both report that they carried cameras pointed back at the ship's thermal protection system, giving engineers photos of the heat shield in orbit before reentry. Flight 14 also flew heat-shield changes meant to address problems seen on earlier tests. Engineers can now set images of the tiles taken in orbit against telemetry and post-flight data, which is the kind of comparison earlier flights could not offer.

Two orbits instead of six

The early exit came at the first scheduled checkpoint. ABC News reported that controllers ended the mission after the Starlink deployment without saying what drove the decision. Astronomy reported the ship fired its deorbit burn about 2 hours 12 minutes after liftoff, after roughly two orbits, using a single sea-level Raptor. Reentry followed, then a landing burn and splashdown at T+3:08:30. Even shortened, ABC said, it was the longest Starship flight yet.

The ending was messier than Flight 13's. Ship 40 floated after splashdown in July. Ship 41 tipped onto its side, and Astronomy reported it exploded six seconds after touchdown. Wikipedia's account describes leftover propellant igniting after the ship fell over. SpaceX had not planned to recover the ship either way, so no hardware was lost that the company intended to keep. A clean, upright splashdown is still what SpaceX needs to see before it tries to catch a returning ship with the tower.

What orbit unlocks and what it doesn't

Reaching orbit is the threshold, and the remaining work sits on the other side of it. NASA is counting on a modified Starship to land the Artemis IV crew on the Moon as early as 2028, Astronomy noted. Before that, SpaceX has to move cryogenic propellant between two Starships in orbit, which nobody has done. Each step in that plan assumes a ship that can stay in orbit for hours, restart its engines reliably, and come home in one piece. Flight 14 showed the first, made the second a question, and only partly delivered the third.

The vacuum engine is the open item. The vacuum Raptors do the heavy lifting once the ship is off the booster, and SpaceX had not published a root cause as of this week. The company has a record of fixing hardware between flights quickly. It also flew Flight 13 eight days after the same vehicle aborted at ignition. But a Raptor that quits on ascent is not something it can leave unexplained on a vehicle meant to carry crews and fuel depots.

Flight 15 has no official date. Wikipedia, citing a SpaceX planning slide dated October 8, lists it no earlier than November 8. That date has already moved once from an earlier slide that showed October 19, and NASASpaceflight warned at the time that these dates tend to slip.

For now, the result is clear. Starship has reached orbit, delivered a payload that stays up, and come back down on purpose. It took three hours instead of ten, it ended in a fireball, and nobody outside SpaceX knows yet why one of its engines stopped.