SpaceX

Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time, Despite Engine Trouble

co-produced by AI28. September 2026, 19:20

After 13 test flights, several explosions and plenty of ridicule, Elon Musk’s giant rocket has finally made it. SpaceX’s Starship has just circled the Earth for the first time on its 14th test flight, deploying 26 satellites of the new Starlink V3 generation along the way. “First orbital flight of Starship successful!” Mr. Musk posted on X. The flight did not go entirely to plan, though: after an engine shut down early, SpaceX brought the ship home much sooner than intended.

One Engine Quits, Orbit Works Anyway

The 124-meter-tall rocket lifted off from Pad 2 at SpaceX’s Starbase site in Texas. The Super Heavy first stage (Booster 21), with its 33 Raptor engines, put the upper stage (Ship 41) on course and then made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX deliberately skipped an attempt to catch the booster with the launch tower’s arms this time.

During ascent, one of the upper stage’s six Raptor 3 engines shut down early, initially leaving the ship on a suborbital trajectory. Flight controllers judged the vehicle to be healthy, however, and fired the orbital insertion burn about 25 minutes after liftoff. SpaceX then reported that Starship had entered Earth orbit “for the first time,” at an altitude of about 275 kilometers.

The original plan called for six orbits and a deorbit burn nearly nine hours after launch, with splashdown off the coast of Chile. After the engine issue, SpaceX opted for an earlier return: after roughly one orbit, the ship slowed itself with a single Raptor, re-entered the atmosphere and came down in the North Pacific. “Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship!” SpaceX wrote.

How Starship Differs From Falcon 9

To understand why the flight matters, it helps to look at its predecessors. Falcon 9 has been SpaceX’s workhorse for years and now carries most of the world’s satellites into space. It stands about 70 meters tall and can lift roughly 17 to 22 tons to low Earth orbit, depending on the mission. Only the first stage is reused, landing upright on a pad or a drone ship. The upper stage burns up after every flight. Falcon Heavy, essentially three Falcon 9 first stages strapped together, can carry up to about 64 tons when flown expendable, but it rarely flies.

Starship plays in a different league. At 124 meters, it is considerably taller than the roughly 110-meter Saturn V that carried NASA to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, and it is the most powerful rocket ever built. The current V3 version is designed to put about 100 tons into orbit, several times what Falcon 9 can manage. The decisive difference lies elsewhere, though: both stages are meant to be fully reusable, with the booster caught by the launch tower and the ship landing as well. If that works routinely, the cost per kilogram of payload could fall dramatically. Mr. Musk believes a launch could eventually cost only about $1 million, while Falcon 9’s list price currently stands at $74 million (about 63 million euros).

SpaceX’s grand plans rest on exactly that: thousands of Starlink satellites, data centers in orbit, moon landings and, someday, flights to Mars. Falcon 9 could deliver none of that, technically or economically.

26 Next-Generation Starlink Satellites

For SpaceX, the cargo matters at least as much as reaching orbit. The 26 Starlink V3 satellites are much larger than their predecessors and fit only inside Starship, not the proven Falcon 9. According to SpaceX, each V3 satellite is designed to add one terabit per second of capacity to the network. Mr. Musk said all 26 were deployed and are operating normally. Three of them also carried cameras to film Starship’s heat shield in space, which had repeatedly shed tiles on earlier flights.

In the future, each flight is expected to carry up to 60 of these satellites. For the satellite internet business, now SpaceX’s biggest moneymaker, that means a massive jump in capacity. It matters on the stock market, too: since its initial public offering, SpaceX has to keep showing investors that Starship is turning from an expensive test project into a workhorse.

Next Stop: Booster Catch and the Moon

The breakthrough follows a bumpy stretch. Last year, three Starship rockets exploded in a row, and on the previous test flight several of the booster’s engines ran into problems, ending in a hard splashdown. The ship itself had already deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites on that flight, though still on a suborbital trajectory. On the next flight, SpaceX plans to try catching the booster with the launch tower again, a key step toward making reuse routine.

Reaching orbit is also the prerequisite for the next big hurdle: refueling in space. A lunar lander version of Starship is supposed to carry astronauts to the moon for NASA’s Artemis program, with the first landing targeted for 2028. Before that, SpaceX needs to launch up to 15 tanker flights to fill the lunar ship with propellant in Earth orbit, something that has never been done before.

Blue Origin and China Are Catching Up

Competition is emerging. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is already flying to orbit with New Glenn and is building its own lunar lander for NASA, Blue Moon. In China, state-owned space companies and startups like LandSpace are developing reusable rockets modeled on SpaceX’s approach. Still, no one else has put a rocket of Starship’s size, designed to be fully reusable, into orbit.