Starship finally made orbit and dropped 26 Starlink satellites despite losing an engine

Starship Flight 14 lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at 8:49 a.m. EDT on September 28 and put its Ship 41 upper stage into orbit about 170 miles (275 km) up, the first time any Starship has stayed in space rather than arcing back down. All 26 Starlink V3 satellites aboard were released, even though one engine had quit early on the way up.

The ship came home early, splashing down in the Pacific roughly three hours after launch instead of flying the longer mission SpaceX had drawn up.

The engine that quit and the go-for-orbit call

According to Space.com’s live coverage of the flight, one of the ship’s Raptor 3 engines shut down unexpectedly early during ascent. The vehicle finished its burn anyway. What followed was a deliberate pause: SpaceQ reported that flight controllers held Ship 41 on a suborbital path for roughly 20 minutes while they checked whether the remaining engines could handle both orbital insertion and the later reentry burn.

SpaceX’s Dan Hewitt closed that review on the webcast by announcing that the go/no-go poll for orbit had finished and the ship was “go for orbit.”

The wording matters because every earlier integrated Starship flight, thirteen of them by New Space Economy’s count, had been flown on an intentionally suborbital trajectory. Flying a full orbit with a damaged propulsion set is a different bar from lofting a ship to the edge of space, and the go decision was made with an engine already out of the picture. UPI added that the engine was relit for the final insertion burn, which Space.com places at 25 minutes and 17 seconds after liftoff.

Twenty-six satellites in half an hour

Deployment began about 34 minutes after liftoff, and the full batch of 26 left the ship over the following half hour. Space.com notes that three of the satellites carry cameras meant to inspect the ship’s own heat tiles, an unusual rider on a delivery flight: the cameras can look back at the thermal protection while the vehicle is still in space, before it faces reentry heating.

The satellites are the new V3 generation. SpaceQ and New Space Economy both cite SpaceX’s design figure of roughly one terabit per second of capacity per satellite once commissioned, which would put the batch near 26 terabits per second. SpaceQ also reports that one Starship load carries bandwidth equal to about ten Falcon 9 launches of the older satellite design, which is the economic argument behind building a rocket this large.

UPI called it the first batch of a new generation meant for high-speed wireless internet service, flown on the company’s first orbital launch attempt with its biggest rocket. No satellite was reported lost during deployment in any of the accounts reviewed, and the satellites are not yet counted as working capacity until SpaceX finishes commissioning them.

An early splashdown and a booster with iced engines

The plan called for six orbits. After weighing how Ship 41 had performed, SpaceX chose an early deorbit burn, and the ship splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii at about 11:58 a.m. EDT, three hours and nine minutes into the mission, according to Space.com. Science Times describes the shortened profile as the direct consequence of the lost engine, which reduced propulsion margin and redundancy for the deorbit burn.

What the flight did not demonstrate is as informative as what it did. Science Times notes that orbital propellant transfer, the capability NASA’s lunar plans lean on, still has to be shown, and that the flight supports SpaceX’s path toward recovering the upper stage rather than proving it. Early plans for the mission had included an attempt to catch Ship 41 with the launch tower’s arms; Tesla Oracle recorded on September 16 that SpaceX was no longer attempting the catch, so the ship was always bound for an ocean splashdown; Science Times says the lost engine moved that splashdown from a planned zone west of Chile to the northern Pacific.

The booster had a quieter but not spotless day. Super Heavy Booster 21 made a soft ocean touchdown as planned, with no tower catch attempted. UPI reported that ice kept two of its 31 engines from reigniting during the landing burn, and SpaceQ added that two heat-shield tiles from the previous ship were reflown on Ship 41, the first tile reuse attempt on Starship.

Regulatory room exists for more of these flights: the FAA’s Starship page lists authorization for up to 25 Starship and Super Heavy orbital launches a year from Boca Chica. As of September 29, New Space Economy noted, SpaceX had not published a root-cause finding for the engine shutdown, so what caused it, and whether the next ship can be trusted with a full six-orbit mission, remains unanswered in public.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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