SpaceX is ready to perform the 14th test flight of its Starship mega-rocket, and now the company will finally try to put the upper stage into Earth’s orbit for the first time, the company announced Tuesday.
The test launch is scheduled for September 22, with a 75-minute launch window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT. During the test launch, SpaceX plans to deploy the first batch of third-generation Starlinks into its network of 10,000 internet satellites. The company expects to launch 26 V3 satellites into orbit in this test flight.
If successful, this will be the first Starship launch to generate revenue for SpaceX’s launch division (even if that revenue is coming from another division of the company).
This will be the second Starship test launch since SpaceX became a publicly traded company in the largest IPO in history in June. The first came in July, when SpaceX successfully deployed V3 Starlink satellites for the first time — though those were only meant to test Starship’s deployment capability and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after roughly 20 minutes.
Getting Starship’s upper stage into orbit around Earth would represent a major milestone for SpaceX. The company has spent billions of dollars on the program and is now looking to retire its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets in favor of Starship. Founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that will happen once Starship is flying “reliably several times per week” to save “scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources.”
SpaceX needs Starship to reliably reach orbit, return to Earth, and get quickly reused to fulfill the massive launch cadence promises that it made during the IPO process.
Starship’s 14th test flight will only test the first part of that equation, though. Musk recently walked back previous claims that SpaceX might try to use its launch tower to catch the Starship upper stage during this flight, saying an explosion would be too big a setback for the company at this point.
SpaceX also won’t try to catch the Super Heavy booster this time. The company has struggled with the booster during its last few test flights and has made multiple changes to try to prevent failures. Yet the booster still struggled to properly relight its engines after separating from the Starship upper stage on Flight 13 in July. For this mission, SpaceX said Tuesday that it made another round of “several modifications” to the booster’s hardware and software to “address issues seen on the previous flight.”
SpaceX had far more success with the upper stage of Starship on Flight 13. While it did not reach orbit, it had a smooth flight through a simulated landing in the Indian Ocean. The upper stage didn’t even explode when it tipped over into the water, allowing SpaceX to spend the last few months capturing and slowly towing it back to its Texas headquarters.
SpaceX said Tuesday that it has made additional changes to the Starship heat shield based on what it learned from studying the recovered upper stage from Flight 13.
