SpaceX's Starship reaches orbit for the first time, despite losing an engine

Starship launched Monday morning from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica Beach, Texas, on its 14th test flight. The mission successfully reached orbit, something none of the previous 13 flights had managed.

• Altitude: About 170 miles.
• Speed: Roughly 17,500 mph.
• Payload: 26 new Starlink V3 satellites.

The catch: one of Starship's more than three dozen engines shut down earlier than planned. SpaceX engineers conferred for several minutes before deciding to press on with the mission rather than abort.

The original plan called for Starship to orbit Earth six times over nearly 10 hours. After the engine issue, SpaceX cut that down to roughly three hours in orbit instead.

In real life Think of it like a road trip where the car develops an engine problem right as you're merging onto the highway. You don't turn around, but you do shorten the trip and head home early instead of taking the scenic route.

Despite the shortened flight, Starship still deployed all 26 of its Starlink V3 satellites, and SpaceX confirmed contact with every one of them once in orbit.

After completing its orbital pass, Starship reentered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, tipping over and catching fire on impact, an expected outcome for this stage of testing rather than a failure.

The 26 Starlink V3 satellites represent SpaceX's newest generation, and this flight marked the first time V3 satellites reached a genuine orbital, rather than suborbital, deployment. Earlier Starship missions carried V3 satellites only as test cargo in suborbital space.

By the numbers: SpaceX says V3 satellites offer a 10-fold increase in downlink speed over the previous V2 generation, reaching 1 terabit per second, along with 22 times greater uplink capacity. The company says the new satellites will also improve direct-to-cell connectivity, letting phones connect straight to satellites without a separate receiver.

Starlink already has more than 11,000 satellites in orbit, and SpaceX's stated long-term goal is a constellation of more than 100,000. Reaching that scale depends heavily on Starship, since a single flight can carry far more satellites than Falcon 9's smaller payload bay ever could.

Reaching orbit wasn't the only test on Monday's flight. The mission also checked whether Starship's Super Heavy booster, which provides the initial lift-off thrust, could be recovered for reuse.

This time, Super Heavy landed in the Gulf of Mexico rather than being caught by the launch tower's mechanical arms, a "chopsticks" catch method SpaceX has previously demonstrated. SpaceX hasn't detailed whether the change was planned or a response to the engine issue earlier in the flight.

Monday's success followed a long string of setbacks. SpaceX launched Starship's first test flight back in April 2023, when the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor engines blasted a crater into the launch pad's concrete, scattering debris across the surrounding area during liftoff.

The second flight came about seven months later, in November 2023, and testing continued in fits and starts from there. More recently, flights 12 and 13 tested the current generation of hardware, but flight 13's booster was lost during its landing attempt, traced to an oxygen and fuel leak that caused a fire near the vehicle's six Raptor engines.

That history makes flight 14's result more than just an incremental step. It's the first time the vehicle has strung together a working ascent, a stable orbit, satellite deployment, and a survivable reentry all in the same mission.

SpaceX isn't the only company racing to build a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has been developing its own New Glenn rocket, which only reached its first flight in January 2025 after more than a decade in development.

New Glenn has had a rougher recent stretch than Starship. During an April 2026 mission, the rocket's first-stage booster landed successfully on a sea-based barge, but its second stage failed to deliver a customer satellite to the correct orbit. The following month, a New Glenn rocket exploded during a ground hotfire test in Cape Canaveral, Florida, a fireball visible for more than a hundred miles that destroyed the vehicle and damaged the surrounding launch complex.

Both companies are competing for the same prize: a role in NASA's Artemis lunar missions. Then-acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy warned both companies that the agency could turn to Blue Origin's lander to return astronauts to the moon as soon as 2028 if SpaceX's own lander program falls too far behind schedule.

Reaching orbit isn't just a milestone for its own sake. SpaceX wants Starship certified by NASA in time for the Artemis III mission, which could launch as soon as next summer.

In that mission, a NASA Orion capsule carrying astronauts would dock first with Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon lander, then later with SpaceX's Starship, according to CNET's reporting. A follow-up mission, Artemis IV, slated for 2028 at the earliest, would have astronauts actually land on the moon using either spacecraft, with moon landings expected to alternate between the two vehicles on future trips.

SpaceX is also expanding where it can launch Starship from, with two additional launch sites planned: one at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and another in Vermilion Parish along Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

At 407 feet tall, Starship is the largest launch vehicle ever built, standing 44 feet taller than NASA's retired Saturn V rocket that once carried astronauts to the moon. Of the 13 flights before Monday's success, several ended in crashes over the Indian Ocean, some intentional tests and some accidents, though no one has ever been hurt in a Starship crash.

Elon Musk originally pitched Starship as a vehicle that could eventually carry human colonists to Mars. For now, though, its primary job is far more immediate: putting Starlink satellites into orbit faster and in greater numbers than SpaceX's older Falcon 9 rocket ever could.

Falcon 9 remains SpaceX's workhorse for most of its launches today, but it can't match Starship's payload capacity or its ambitions for full reusability of both stages. Starship is designed to eventually replace Falcon 9 for SpaceX's heaviest and highest-volume missions, including the bulk of future Starlink deployments.

Why it matters: the Falcon 9 vs. New Glenn vs. Starship comparison isn't just academic anymore. With one company having just reached orbit despite an engine failure and the other having just lost a rocket to an explosion, the practical gap between the two heavy-lift programs looks wider today than it did a few months ago, even though both are still technically in active testing.