SpaceX flew a Starship into orbit for the first time Monday, but not before one of Ship 41’s engines quit, forcing a 20-minute hold while controllers decided whether the mission would go for orbit. Ship 41 was given the green light to push on to orbit, then released 26 Starlink version 3 (V3) satellites — the first time SpaceX has added operational satellites to the network from Starship.
Before the drama, the booster came home first. Super Heavy Booster 21, also flying for the first time, lit all 33 engines at liftoff and separated from Ship 41 in a hot-staging manoeuvre a little over two minutes later. It flew its usual arc back toward the Gulf and splashed down softly off Starbase.
An engine issue
One of Ship 41’s six engines, a Raptor engine, shut down early during the ascent burn. SpaceX had said all week it would only commit to orbit if every system checked out, so flight controllers held the ship in its suborbital holding pattern for about 20 minutes while they checked the three sea-level engines it would need both to reach orbit and, later, to come home.
“We’ve got the saying, only the paranoid survive,” SpaceX’s Dan Hewitt told the broadcast before liftoff. “That’s going to be in full effect today.”
It was. Once the review was done, Hewitt delivered the line viewers had been waiting for: “The go/no-go poll for orbit has finished. And we are go for orbit.” Ship 41 lit a single engine fed from tanks in its nose cone, a burn Starship had never attempted, and reached orbit roughly 275 kilometres up.
A shorter flight
Flight documentation filed before launch said controllers could end the mission after as few as two orbits, depending on how Ship 41 looked once it reached space, well short of the six orbits over about 10 hours SpaceX had described publicly. Monday’s flight used that option. Ship 41 splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii about three hours after liftoff, roughly two orbits instead of six.
Ship 41 began releasing Starlink satellites about 34 minutes after liftoff, deploying all 26 satellites over the next half hour, each said to add roughly a terabit per second of capacity to the network. SpaceX put the total in context: one full Starship load moves about as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches of the older satellite version.
A Starship flight in July had test-deployed 20 of the same satellites without adding them to the network. Monday’s 26 should start serving customers within a few weeks the company said.
Starship’s 14th flight is set to launch on Monday, Sept 28. The 75-minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT. Live coverage of the mission starts ~35 minutes before launch → https://t.co/uQKQvgaTmJ — SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 27, 2026
Tiles fly twice
In the last Starship launch, Ship 40 survived splashdown and floated in the Indian Ocean for weeks. SpaceX used that time to study it. Two of its tiles were then bolted to Ship 41 — the first tiles SpaceX has reflown on Starship. SpaceX also made other changes based from the same study: retention pins where tiles are most likely to shed during launch, and closed gaps where plasma had been slipping in behind others.
“We are sitting on a mine of gold, of data that would allow us to improve the design at least three months earlier than what I thought we were going to be able to do,” an engineer on the recovery team said in a SpaceX documentary episode released earlier this month.
Like the last flight, SpaceX added inspection cameras on three of the 26 satellites to photograph the rest of the heat shield from orbit.
Point-to-Point flights?
As usual, SpaceX used the broadcast to go over items its working such as the StarMind orbital AI constellation announced in June, but another mentioned, surprisingly, and with no details, was an old promise resurfacing: flying passengers between two points on Earth in under an hour, a pitch the company hasn’t talked up much lately.
They also spent some time, and showed a video, of the future Starbase Louisiana.
On a historical note, eighteen years ago on this day, Sept. 28, 2008, a Falcon 1 reached orbit on its fourth try, the flight that kept SpaceX alive long enough to build the Falcon 9 and eventually the rocket that flew today.