Transcript
Introduction
Years of Notable Successes…
“I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it now.”
…Unfortunate Setbacks…
“You can see we’ve lost several engines and we’ve lost attitude control of the vehicle.”
…And Welcome Serendipity…
“For some reason we don’t understand, the rocket is just there, floating and happy.”
…Paved the Way for Starship Flight 14. The mission set to be the first orbital flight of a Starship rocket in program history.
“Flight 14, which for the CFO is very exciting because it’s going to be a revenue-generating flight.”
The marathon mission scheduled to span nearly ten hours is a critical step in unlocking SpaceX’s own business ambitions, like AI data centers in space, as well as obligations to the U.S. government through NASA’s moon-focused astronaut ambition called the Artemis program.
Here’s what you need to know about the road to Starship Flight 14 and what SpaceX hopes it will accomplish.
Going Orbital
As we said in the intro, this will be SpaceX’s first attempt at launching its ship upper stage into orbit.
In a reply post on social media to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, SpaceX founder Elon Musk says, quote, “We could have done that long before now [to be honest], but are optimizing for safety.”
Based off of what SpaceX’s Bill Gerstenmaier said during his keynote address at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in 2025, that first potential for an orbital launch would’ve been Flight 13, the second launch of a Starship version 3 rocket.
“We’ll try a full orbital flight sometime next year. So this next one again will be suborbital. Again, we’re gonna try to do, understand how the ship flies and we’ll do that kind of activity. Then next year we step up to another version of both ship and booster called V3. It also has a new Raptor engine underneath with more performance than the previous ones. So we’ll fly V3 first and then if that’s successful, then we’ll probably go orbital after that with that next V3.”
In an update posted to its website, SpaceX says it will intentionally underperform what Starship is capable of and not send it directly to orbit following stage separation.
“For Starship’s initial orbital flights, it will still be placed initially on a passively safe suborbital trajectory and require a second burn to achieve orbit,” SpaceX wrote.
SpaceX shared this graphical overlay of their mission timeline for Flight 14. Following the ascent burn, teams will have a roughly 19-minute coast period during which they will decide on whether they will commit to performing the orbital insertion burn. That’s planned to happen about 25-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.
That decision point creates a fork in the road. If no insertion burn takes place, then the rocket will follow a similar suborbital trajectory as previous flights. But if teams complete a health check and determine that they’re good to go, they’ll conduct the insertion burn.
Road to Ship Reuse
A big focus of the previous missions was understanding the performance of the thermal protection system and continuously developing the heat shield tiles.
Flight 13 was a proud moment for SpaceX’s recovery team. That’s when Ship 40 not only had a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, not only stayed intact after tipping over, but it also remained afloat and continued to send telemetry from the water. That presented a unique opportunity as showcased in SpaceX’s documentary series.
“It looks like the Ship is going to give us some time.”
“Can we go get that thing?”
“We had a plan to do that and we had descoped that for the last two flights for V3.”
“What’s the closest, like, ship or plane or whatever?”
“Well we have a ship fairly close that is very much, it’s big enough to—”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Someone suggested that the flaps paddle us home.”
“Just start swimming.”
“We’re gonna start getting scrappy and see what we got. We don’t have the tow gear.”
“Get it back.”
“We will try.”
Through a series of trial and error, the recovery team was eventually able to get Ship 40 over to Christmas Island. There, engineers were able to scramble on top of the rocket to recover some of the tiles and gain valuable, first-hand information about the heat shield’s performance long before a tower catch is attempted.
“My first reaction when I saw the rocket tip over and survive was like of amazement because I was not expecting that. And I was like rejoicing. And the second thought was like, oh, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, 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. I’m going to bring you some more pieces. We have a chance to get the data to fix the new one and figure out what the next layer of the onion that we need to unwrap and to make the vehicle fully reusable.”
In its Starship Flight 14 write-up, SpaceX said some of the learning that’s folded into the Ship 41 heat shield include quote, “additional retention mechanisms added to tiles in areas deemed to be at highest risk of falling off during ascent, addressing recently discovered areas that offer flow paths behind tiles for plasma, and flying multiple areas with a curved tile design that has shown the ability to reduce heating in the gaps between tiles.”
SpaceX said two of the tiles from Ship 40 are also being reflown on Ship 41. This marks the company’s first attempt at re-flying part of the TPS. But as shown in their documentary series, the practice of retrieving a Starship from the ocean and bringing it back to Starbase is a timely and laborious task. To make true reusability a reality, they will have to follow through on their vision of returning a ship to the launch site and catching it with one of their towers.
Speaking virtually at the All-In Summit, Musk laid out SpaceX’s ambition.
“This will be the last flight before we attempt to catch the Ship. So if this flight goes well, then on Flight 15, we will try to catch the ship, and then either end of this year, but more likely early next, we will re-fly the ship and re-fly the booster. So we have re-flown the booster already, but we’ve not caught the ship with the tower arms, nor have we re-flown the ship. So once we can re-fly the ship, we will have made the first fully reusable orbital rocket.”
Super Heavy Booster
Speaking of the booster, the Flight 13 launch on July 24, 2026, marked the company’s second flight of the version 3 iteration of the Starship-Super Heavy launcher. While improved over Flight 12, there were still some issues that arose.
For instance, the Flight 13 Super Heavy booster, tail number B20, was able to start its boostback burn with all 33-Raptor engines as intended. But it wasn’t the success they’d hoped for.
“In the terminal phase of the burn, the three center engines showed signs of ice clogging which triggered an early end to the maneuver,” SpaceX wrote on its website.
“The booster went on to attempt a landing burn, with 8 of the 13 planned engines reigniting before the booster made a hard splashdown in the Gulf. The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability.”
Part of SpaceX’s goal of rapid reusability is being able to both launch and catch the boosters. The ability to catch was first demonstrated on Flight 5 and the first booster to be reflown took off on Flight 9, albeit with some of the Raptor engines replaced. Those development milestones were done using version one and two boosters.
The first version 3 booster produced — Booster 18 — burst during a test at the Massey’s testing site in November 2025. The next two version 3 Super Heavy boosters off the line — Boosters 19 and 20 — both encountered issues that prevented nominal flights, especially during the boostback burns and landing burn attempts, as we partially discussed.
In preparation for Flight 14, SpaceX performed a 33-engine static fire test with Booster 21 in late August. But out of an abundance of caution, SpaceX will again forego a catch attempt. SpaceX says for the flight of Booster 21 to be successful, it needs to nominally complete the following:
Launch ascent
Stage separation
Boostback burn
Landing burn out in the Gulf.
SpaceX says there were quote “several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight,” but didn’t offer much in the way of details on that.
Starlink V3
The goal of reaching orbit for Starship is, of course, what it can deliver to orbit. SpaceX intends to send Ship 41 to low Earth orbit at an altitude of 275 km or about 171 statute miles above the Earth’s surface.
From there, beginning about 34 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX will deploy a series of 26 Starlink V3 satellites over the course of half an hour. The company notes that each satellite will add about 1 terabit per second of capacity to the Starlink network.
SpaceX says that’s quote “ten times the capacity compared to a single launch of V2 mini Starlink satellites on Falcon 9.” Similarly to Flight 13, three of the Starlink satellites that will be deployed will include additional cameras designed to capture imagery of the heat shield tiles. Multiple camera views were stitched together to create this video of Ship 40 in space.
Speaking at a conference held by Goldman Sachs, the lead underwriter for SpaceX’s $75 billion initial public offering, SpaceX’s Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen described the significance of this milestone and what lies ahead.
“I love the demonstration flights and now I’m excited that we’re moving into production cadence and flying production V3 Starlink satellites to orbit on our next flight. So I think that’ll be a huge milestone for us. And then if you look beyond Flight 14, you know, starting to get a shot at bringing back both the first and second stage will be big milestones coming up for later this year.”
Artemis Importance
Starship Flight 14 comes as we’re about to enter the final quarter of 2026. That’s just nine months before NASA’s planned Artemis III mission. In addition to NASA’s Orion spacecraft performing a rendezvous and docking with a Pathfinder version of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, it’s also set to dock with a modified Starship Version 3 rocket with a docking adaptor.
On the sidelines of the Eighth Space Coast Symposium in Brevard County, Florida, where NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman gave a keynote address, we and a few media colleagues spoke with him about various aspects of the Artemis program. That included asking what milestones he needed to see to understand whether he thought Starship would be ready in time for the midsummer mission.
“Artemis III requires getting into orbit and a lot of reliability on the launch vehicle and on Starship itself, because we’re gonna put human beings right next to it on Orion, right? So not only do they need to get to orbit, but we wanna obviously see a lot of reliability in the vehicle, and they’re learning from every one of them. So you wanna progress away from engine outs in these types of situations and say, okay, the first couple steps are going extremely well. Artemis IV, you have to be nailing reusability, that obviously not a requirement, although I’m sure they would find it ideal for building up to Artemis III. But Artemis IV, they’ve gotta be catching boosters routinely in Starship as well, return to launch site, and gaining more confidence in that. So yeah, that would be how we’re looking.”
Less than a month later, during the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland, Ohio, NASA Associate Administrator and Chief Engineer Amit Kshatriya answered our question about how soon Blue Origin and SpaceX’s respective lander demonstrators need to be on their launch pads in order to keep the June timeline for Artemis III in play.
“When they have to be on the pads? I think you back it up about, I mean, we have to have pretty high confidence in the launch reliability several months before a June launch, but I think there’s better people qualified to answer how that sequence is going. And a lot of them are in this room. But you know we’re trying to be as open-minded as we can recognizing that again, SLS launch probabilities are what they are. We’ve only had two shots at it. And we’re trying to enable the flight test and recovery all over the place. So I think, you know, we, we, we start regular cadence, you know, in the early part of next year and we can see that my confidence increase in terms of that probability.”
With NASA being just one customer of many watching the progress of Starship, SpaceX has quite a bit they need to prove out as some important milestones draw ever closer. Reporting for Spaceflight Now, I’m Will Robinson-Smith.
