Starship makes orbit!
Starship 30 seconds after launch, on September 28, 2026
Starship/Superheavy successfully achieved its first fully orbital flight, and in the process also deployed 26 operational Starlink satellites, making this also the first revenue-producing Starship launch for SpaceX.
The flight was not perfect. Superheavy lost one engine during the latter part of liftoff, then lost a second engine after stage separation when fired its boost-back burn to bring it back to the gulf off the coast of Texas for a soft vertical splashdown simulating a chopstick capture. Despite the loss of two engines, it appears to complete that soft splashdown as planned, though this is not confirmed.
Starship meanwhile continued firing its own engines to reach a preliminary suborbital flight path. Near the end of that burn it lost one of its outer engines. It nonetheless reached the right preliminary orbit, but because of the engine loss engineers spent about fifteen minutes discussing whether that engine issue would preclude going to full orbit and completing all six orbits. In the end they decided to go to orbit, and were successful.
The ship that successfully deployed all 26 Starlinks, all of which appeared to be operating as expected.
Because of the engine issue, however, the decision was then made to de-orbit early, after completing about two orbits, bringing the ship back over the northern Pacific, likely to have it avoid habitable land as much as possible. At landing Starship successfully completed a soft vertical splashdown, but it then exploded. No recovery of this ship will take place, as occurred on the previous flight.
The leader board for the 2026 launch race:
111 SpaceX
60 China
16 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
12 Russia
For the first time in three years SpaceX no longer leads the entire world combined in total launches. This single American company now trails the rest of the world in successful launches in 2026 by 112 to 111.
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
Once again, freedom and private enterprise proves it is the best way to get things done. Step-by-step SpaceX has been developing the most powerful rocket ever conceived, that is also completely reusable. Fifteen years ago, before the company proved reusability was possible with Falcon 9, we were consistently told that such things were impractical and in fact impossible. That pessimistic view came from the government-controlled rockets built by the old established rocket companies which no longer cared much for competition or innovation.
Competition and freedom however allowed SpaceX to arrive and prove those nay-sayers 100% wrong. It has not only resulted in this magnificent new rocket, Starship/Superheavy, it has trained a whole new generation of modern innovative and competitive engineers and managers, willing to take risks and build their own companies. Hence, the renaissance in space in the past decade.
And we’ve only just begun!
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Gotta fix those pesky engine outs. But otherwise a magnificent flight. Looks like re-entry issues are dealt with – no worries on disintegrating flaps etc.
Congrats to SpaceX – major milestones checked off.
In the words of The Big Lebowski:
They Achieved.
SpaceX is having problems with the V3 engines. It could be that parameters that are being monitored are held too tight for V3 engines. There may still be plumbing issues to the engines. But they did better with B21 than B20.
As I said, “step-by-step.” The track record of SpaceX’s engineers is that they attack an issue aggressively until it vanishes. It appears they are on that path with the engines.
Referring to your points. What would it have cost to teach this point with old space cost plus?? Even at that cost, could they have done it at all??
Well, X-15 was cost-plus, reusable, and got to space. But it was not purely cost-plus-fixed-fee, there were elements of fixed price in the 10-year operational history. The refurbishment coast went down as the program gained more experience.
That would be worthy of study. But the X-15 was far from being able to get to orbital velocity or surviving an orbital re-entry.
“Fifteen years ago, before the company proved reusability was possible with Falcon 9, we were consistently told that such things were impractical and in fact impossible.“
Impractical, yes, but not impossible. By fifteen years ago orbital reusability had already been demonstrated 130 times.
“That pessimistic view came from the government-controlled rockets built by the old established rocket companies…”
Those old established rocket companies were the ones who had demonstrated orbital reusability.
And where is that technology now?
Continually amazed at how people reject reality in favor of fantasy. Carry on, mkent. Good luck.
There were people who insisted it was impossible for a private company to do it, and believed only governments could make it happen. There are still people today who think it’s impossible, though for a different reason-they’re flat earth cranks.
None of the companies you might refer to ever took reuse seriously, which can be adduced from the fact that none of them pursued it unless the government paid them billions. Demonstrating a capability is meaningless if it cannot or is not practically used. The Shuttle is the closest to SpaceX, and yet it flew less than a quarter as often over three times the period (it took SpaceX about 9.3 years to go from its first booster reuse to the 600th).
mkent,
“By fifteen years ago orbital reusability had already been demonstrated 130 times.”
Ah, yes. The importance of the comma and punctuation. “… possible, with Falcon 9 — with the comma — means that Falcon 9 proved the possibility, but “… possible with Falcon 9 — without the comma — means that Falcon 9 was proved reusable.
One of my most remembered bumper stickers:
Unfortunately, we all seem to have difficulty placing the commas correctly when we write and have difficulty interpreting them when we read.
“Those old established rocket companies were the ones who had demonstrated orbital reusability.”
Which is the whole point of the paragraph. It was those old established rocket companies that were telling us that reusability of a booster was either impossible or uneconomical. It didn’t matter to them that NASA had proposed to launch an early version of the Space Shuttle on a reusable Saturn first stage (S-IC). The bad experience of the Space Shuttle discouraged many rocket engineers from trying reusability, because they truly thought that it was impractical.
If it were up to government space (including the old space companies) we would still be stuck with SLS as the state of the art. Blue Origin and SpaceX have already advanced the state of the art,* and they could only do it because government relented and finally let We the People have our own rocket companies that government would use. This has allowed Varda to advance the state of the art in space manufacturing. We the People are trying new things, and many of them are succeeding.
____________
* Several other companies are developing additional examples of leadership in the state of the art.
Robert wrote:
It was private enterprise making launch vehicles for other private enterprises that got us to build the reusable rockets — the ones that so many people said were necessary so that the space launch business could work similar to the airlines, which also reuse their transport hardware. When we have the entire country available to try new things, more is tried than when the government decides what gets tried. We the People throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. The ones that stick is how we advance the sate of the art. As the state of the art improves, more people are able to do more with the improved technology. Technology is democratizing everything.
And we don’t have to spend taxpayer money to do it.
NSF did a good job in its YouTube channel coverage. Young guys who all speak very well, great play by play. Network news would do very well bringing them on for expert commentary. Still would like more speculation and information. Why no tower catch? What causes the engine out occurrences? Why the explosion at the end? Talk about the decision to phase out Falcon 9 – is it the equivalent of US airlines only flying jumbo jets?
Flight 14’s plan was to splash in the Pacific, not go for a water landing, because what they wanted to test was getting to orbit. Once they can do that reliably, they’ll bring the ship back to Starbase and try and catch it. There are many possible explanations for the engines going out, but not much information for speculation. The flight computer is probably what shut them down, because they were controlled, not abrupt.. As for the explosion, I’ve read that it was from residual propellants left in the ship that ignited when it keeled over. It’s not a big deal, the spacecraft isn’t designed to survive water landings.
Not precisely. So long as Starship can reach the target orbit a customer wants, what matters is cost, and they want to reach a price tag in the low millions with a mature Starship. Size is less important here than the price customers pay. If all rockets were reusable, your analogy would be better. Falcon 9 will end up costing SpaceX more to operate while delivering less to orbit, and all of their plans are big-expanding Starlink, building Starmind, industrializing the Moon, colonizing Mars, and perhaps mining the asteroids. They’ll need millions of tons delivered to space.
Well said, as usual, Nate!
“Falcon 9 will end up costing SpaceX more to operate while delivering less to orbit.”
Which is why Elon is so eager to retire Falcon 9 as soon as possible. And rightly so.
Water. Sigh. I meant tower.
I figured that was what you meant.
SpaceX overnight posted an official blog post about the mission, for those interested:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
I saw a post on X that said, basically that the economics of this flight were the same as Falcon 9, and that included throwing away the Superheavy and the Spaceship. So SpaceX could already transition off of Falcon 9 completely, except they now can launch 50T at a time instead of 10T, and the much larger Starlinks as payload. No wonder they started decommissioning of one of their Falcon pads recently, it’s almost like SpaceX ran the same numbers.
I’m sure I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still *remarkable* how biased and inflammatory so much of the media coverage of this flight has been so far.
First example (and I have many more): Axios delivers a news story which packs the critical language right into its lede:
“SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket came back to Earth earlier than planned after its first orbital flight Monday, with an explosion visible on the company’s livestream just after touchdown in the Pacific Ocean.”
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/28/spacex-starship-orbital-flight
The actual major achievement of this mission (first orbital flight) is squeezed in the middle, blink-and-you-miss-it. Everything else is tailored to paint a mission which it wants you to believe was a terrible failure. Never mind that the self destruction of both stages was planned!
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t highlight the engine failures, which suggests that the writer and the editor are not even knowledgeable enough to deliver a really good but job. But don’t worry, plenty of other news outlets did….
This Reuters headline is especially shameful in its bias: “SpaceX’s Starship engine failure could impact NASA’s moon mission objectives.” I won’t link to it, because garbage propaganda doesn’t deserve a plug.
Hello Bob,
Some more examples of egregious, click bait legacy media treatments of the mission, and following your example, I will not supply links – well, unless someone asks for them. But they are easy enough to find:
“Dramatic explosion as world’s most powerful rocket reaches orbit and then crashes into ocean”
(Independent, UK)
(Nota bene: A Green Party peer in the British House of Lords, Natalie Bennett, reacted to this story with this tweet: ‘At what environmental cost? “Spacecraft is being landed in the sea with no plan to recover and recycle it…exploded in a huge fireball once it had hit the water” #PlanetaryBoundaries’. She got slapped quickly with a Community Note.)
SpaceX’s Starship reaches orbit for the first time, then returns early and blows up in a fiery explosion
(LiveScience)
Massive SpaceX rocket explodes in a fireball as it hits ocean following test flight
(Daily Mail, UK)
Elon Musk’s SpaceX ambitions ‘up in the air’ despite Starship launch into orbit
(Sky News)
Those are just the headlines. Go read the actual stories, and it just gets worse.
Peter Hague comments: “You don’t hate the legacy media enough.” Indeed.