Starship Flight 14 reaches orbit on one engine and starts deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites
Starship launched Sept 28 and reached orbit on one engine; all 26 Starlink V3 satellites deployed and connected, and the ship deorbited early after ~3 hours.
SpaceX’s Starship lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at about 12:46 UTC on September 28 on its 14th test flight — the first attempt to send the upper stage into Earth orbit and the first time it carries a real payload. The Super Heavy booster B21 splashed down on plan about 6 minutes 50 seconds after liftoff, but one vacuum Raptor then failed, and the ship completed its orbital insertion burn on the single remaining engine, reaching a roughly 275 km orbit.
The facts
- Launch and orbit: liftoff at about 12:46 UTC from OLP-2 at Starbase; the orbital insertion burn completed about 25.5 minutes into flight, targeting roughly 275 km at a 32-degree inclination.
- Engine failure: per IT之家 live updates and the Wikipedia mission page, one vacuum Raptor failed at about T+8:11; insertion proceeded on a single engine.
- Early return and splashdown: SpaceX decided about 1.5 hours into the flight to end the mission early — ship S41 deorbited after roughly 3 hours in orbit versus the planned six orbits over ~10 hours and has completed its splashdown in the pre-cleared Pacific area west of Chile; all 26 Starlink V3 satellites have been contacted and should start serving customers within weeks.
- Competitive backdrop: per The Verge, Starlink has over 11,000 satellites in orbit with 552 launched since July 2; Amazon’s Leo (formerly Kuiper) has 396 and has gone 12 weeks without a launch, with ULA’s Vulcan grounded, New Glenn’s pad destroyed in May, and an Ariane 6 component issue scrubbing launches.
Our take
The real story is Starship finally doing operational work — carrying the next generation of Starlink, with all 26 satellites deployed and connected. V3 satellites have far more capacity per unit than V2 mini, so once Starship’s cadence stabilizes, the constellation grows on a different curve — while Amazon’s Leo watches all three of its launch providers sit grounded. The open question is still why an apparently clean mission ended about seven hours early — SpaceX hasn’t explained, so watch for the debrief.