SpaceX’s Starship Flight 14 Reaches Orbit and Releases Twenty Six New Starlinks

Monday morning at Starbase on the Texas coast, a 407-foot stack of stainless steel left the pad at 7:48 local time with 33 Raptor engines burning methane underneath. Flight 14 carried a clearer assignment than the thirteen tests before it. Earlier flights stayed on suborbital arcs. This one was meant to stay up, place real satellites in orbit, and come back down on a controlled path.

Super Heavy pushed the ship through the dense air and past the speed of sound. One booster engine stopped early, disrupting the ascend plans, and another flatlined as they attempted to fire it for the return sequence, but controllers were still able to get the boostback and landing burns to go off over the gulf. Seven minutes after liftoff, the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. Once the engines stopped, the flight termination mechanism kicked in, shutting off all possibility of seizing the tower on this pass .

Up top, the Starship encountered its own problems, with one of the Vacuum Raptor engines refusing to fire during ascension. The other two had to run longer to compensate for the lost time, which meant the main engine cutoff came a little later than intended, but still fell short of a stable orbit. Teams were optimistic, but Dan Huot, who was in charge of the flight for SpaceX, stated that they would have to wait and see how reliable the remaining engines were before deciding whether or not to attempt to reach space. After some further testing, they decided to give a single sea-level Raptor a 19-second test, which increased the speed by around 200 mph and placed the vehicle in low earth orbit at 171 miles altitude and 17,500 miles per hour.

The payload bay swung open when orbit was established. A cable and pulley system launched 26 Starlink V3 satellites one at a time over nearly half an hour, each weighing close to two metric tons, which is far too large for a Falcon 9 fairing, and each with a capacity of one terabit per second. Good news all around, since laser links, ground stations, and user terminals were able to communicate with all 26 after they were launched. Three of the satellites had cameras pointing back at the ship, recording how well the heat shield performed during reentry. The original plan called for a roughly 10-hour trip with many full orbits, however because to the early engine failure, controllers chose to shorten the journey to about 3 hours. They were able to fit in a brief de-orbit burn to move the ship toward the northern Pacific, north of Hawaii.

Re-entry generated a plasma sheath that reached temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and all 20,000 of the little hexagonal tiles remained intact despite the heat. The ship then began slowing through the transonic regime, flipped itself around, fired the landing engines, and splashed down in the water at 11:57 a.m. Eastern. The hit was rough, and the car wound up on its side, so it wasn’t one of the most intact splashdowns we’d witnessed. That is a shame, but the harm has already been done. NASA has assigned the Starship the role of crew lander for future Artemis missions, including a docking demonstration against Orion scheduled for next year.