Starship has flown 13 times and never once gone around the planet. Flight 14 is the one where that changes, and SpaceX says it’s now aiming for Monday, September 28, with a 75-minute window opening at 8:15AM Eastern Time.
That’s six days later than the September 22 date the company had been working toward. SpaceX posted the slip on X without saying why, and it added the usual caveat that the launch is still pending regulatory approval. So treat the date as a target, not a promise.
“Now targeting to launch Starship Flight 14 as early as Monday, September 28, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX said on X on September 17.
The bigger story isn’t the date. It’s that this flight is meant to do real work for the first time.
Six laps, 10 hours, 171 miles up
Every previous Starship test has been suborbital, which SpaceX has framed as a way “to maximize public safety while allowing for maximum learning.” The vehicle would go up, come most of the way around, and come down before completing a full orbit.
This time the plan is for Starship to climb to 171 miles and circle Earth six times over roughly 10 hours. SpaceX describes the orbital phase as the next step toward flying the vehicle on actual missions and proving it can be reused.
And unlike the last few flights, nobody is trying to catch anything. The Super Heavy booster is set to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, renamed the Gulf of America in 2025 by President Donald Trump, a few minutes after liftoff. The upper stage will finish its orbits and then come down in the Pacific Ocean near Chile.
The first Starlink V3 satellites that will serve customers
Riding along are 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and this is the part worth paying attention to. On the previous test, Starship carried the next-gen satellites for the first time, but that was a capability check. They unfolded their solar arrays and antennas, talked to the rest of the constellation, and then burned up in the atmosphere.
The 26 going up on Flight 14 are supposed to stay and serve customers. That makes this the first time V3 hardware joins the working Starlink network.
The spec jump is not small. Each V3 satellite can support 1 Tbps of downlink, 10 times what a V2 satellite manages, and 160 Gbps of uplink, a 22-times increase over V2. Whether that translates into a noticeable difference for anyone’s dish depends on how many of these SpaceX can get up, and Starship is the only vehicle it has that can carry them.
If you want to watch, SpaceX will stream the launch on its X account. Set an alarm for 8:15AM Eastern on the 28th, and don’t be surprised if the date moves again.
