Starship Flight 14 Puts 26 Starlink Satellites on the Line

SpaceX finished Starship Flight 14’s launch rehearsal on Thursday, September 24, and kept Monday, September 28, as the opening of a 75-minute window at 7:15 a.m. CT. The 407-foot stack on Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas, is built for the company’s first trip to orbit, and it still needs a Federal Aviation Administration launch license.

The cargo is what makes the orbit count. If Ship 41 stays up, 26 Starlink V3 satellites stay with it. If the insertion burn is skipped, they come back down, as 20 V3s did in July.

26 Starlink V3 Satellites Are the Actual Cargo

SpaceX plans to send 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit for the first time, then have them unfold antennas, open solar arrays, and talk to the network by radio and laser. Each bird adds 1 Tbps of capacity, so the load is 26 Tbps, which SpaceX puts at about 10 times one Falcon 9 launch of V2 Mini satellites.

Flight 13 already dumped 20 V3s overboard. They made contact with the constellation, then fell because the ship never reached orbit. This stack is the first one asked to leave them there. After checkouts, SpaceX says they should start serving customers as soon as a few weeks after launch, once onboard thrusters raise them from the insertion altitude.

HOW V3 COMPARES WITH V2

Starlink’s own page lists 1 Tbps of downlink capacity and 160 Gbps of uplink on V3, with six 400-gigabit space lasers and new solar blankets cut from a continuous roll. It also says a full Starship V3 launch is built to add about 20 times the capacity of a Falcon 9 launch of V2 satellites, a design figure for a heavier load than the 26 birds on this flight.

Three of the 26 carry camera suites to scan Starship’s heat shield in orbit and send the pictures down before reentry. That is the same trick Flight 13 used, cut from six camera sats to three, and it only helps if the ship is still circling when they shoot.

Starship Will Only Enter Orbit If It Can Leave

All 13 flights before this one flew a suborbital path: high and fast, then back down in about an hour. Ship 41 is supposed to light engines again at T+ 25 minutes 17 seconds, burn for 19 seconds, and pick up the speed that turns a long throw into a closed loop at about 275 kilometers (171 miles).

SpaceX will not even start that burn unless the hardware for the later slowdown is healthy. The deorbit firing is a single Raptor, listed at T+ 8 hours 52 minutes 37 seconds and lasting 11 seconds. The flight plan also has health checks that can cut the stay to two or five orbits instead of about six.

Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission.

SpaceX, Starship Flight 14 mission page

That rule is why the satellites are still a maybe at T+ 25 minutes. A ship that cannot prove it can come home does not get to stay, and the payload follows the ship. SpaceX wants a nearly 10-hour flight and a splashdown west of Chile. The published clock puts landing at 9 hours 50 minutes 30 seconds, which is the timed mark under that rounded duration.

When Starship Flight 14 Lifts Off From Starbase

Starship Flight 14 is targeted for Monday, September 28, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas. SpaceX finished the launch rehearsal on Thursday, September 24, and still lists the flight as pending regulatory approval from the FAA.

A wet dress rehearsal fills Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold methane and oxygen, runs the count almost to ignition, then drains the tanks. It is launch day with the engines off, and it is how leaks and pad problems show up before anything leaves Texas. SpaceX posted that the run was done Thursday afternoon.

Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026

The official line was short: “Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14.” A live webcast is set to start about 30 minutes before liftoff and to keep going through splashdown, with hours of ship-cam if the stack actually stays up. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, posted a photo of the stainless steel stack on Friday, September 25.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The rehearsal: SpaceX completed the Flight 14 launch rehearsal on Pad 2 on September 24 with Booster 21 and Ship 41 stacked.
• The window: Monday, September 28, 75 minutes, opening at 7:15 a.m. CT, listed as no earlier than that date.
• The cargo: 26 Starlink V3 satellites, three of them with heat-shield cameras, aimed at a few weeks to service if they stay up.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The license: SpaceX still describes the attempt as pending regulatory approval, and no FAA launch license has been announced.
• The insertion: controllers can withhold the orbit burn if the deorbit hardware lacks backup, which would drop the satellites with the ship.

The pad work is no longer the public argument. Thursday’s silent countdown already showed the stack can be filled and drained, so the open item on Friday was still a signature in Washington.

Ice Clogged Three Center Engines on Flight 13

Flight 13 left Pad 2 at 5:51 p.m. CT on Friday, July 24, 2026, with Booster 20 and Ship 40, the second flight of the V3 vehicles. Ship 40 did its job. The booster did not finish clean.

After hot-staging, Super Heavy used all 33 engines on the boostback burn for the first time, SpaceX said, then the three center engines showed ice clogging and the burn ended early. On the landing burn, 8 of 13 planned engines reignited and the booster hit the Gulf off Texas hard.

FLIGHT 13 PROBLEMS, FLIGHT 14 FIXES

• Ice in the centers: Flight 13’s three center engines showed clogging in the last part of boostback, which cut the burn short.
• Thin landing burn: only 8 of 13 engines lit for the splashdown attempt, and Booster 20 made a hard water landing.
• New filtering: Booster 21 flies with hardware changes meant to improve filtering to the engines.
• Relight software: SpaceX also loaded software changes aimed at making those relights more reliable.

The booster’s test on Monday is still a launch, a staging, a boostback, and a landing burn at an offshore point in the Gulf, not a catch on the tower. The vehicle is designed to carry more than 100 metric tonnes to orbit when it is flying as a reusable truck. This flight is the first time the upper stage is even asked to stay in orbit, at 124 meters (407 feet) on the pad.

Ship 41 Reuses Heat-Shield Tiles From Ship 40

Ship 40 came through reentry, flipped, and settled in the Indian Ocean intact, which gave SpaceX its first long look at a whole heat shield after a splashdown. Two tiles pulled off that ship are bolted onto Ship 41. SpaceX calls that the first tile reuse on Starship.

The rest of the shield work on this flight is a punch list from plasma that found paths behind tiles, and from tiles that wanted to leave during ascent.

HEAT SHIELD CHANGES ON SHIP 41

• Extra fasteners: more retention hardware on tiles in the spots most likely to fall off on the way up.
• Plasma paths: fixes for gaps that let superheated gas slip behind the tiles on earlier flights.
• Curved tiles: several patches fly a curved design that has cut heating in the gaps between tiles in tests.
• Reflown pair: two tiles recovered from Ship 40 fly again on Ship 41.

The three camera satellites are there to grade that work in orbit, before the ship has to trust the shield on the way back to Chile. A catch of the ship is still months away, so this heat shield only has to survive one reentry and a water landing, then send its pictures home.

From Liftoff to a Pacific Splashdown

SpaceX published a full countdown and a flight clock with every time marked approximate. The load-bearing stamps are the ones that decide whether the satellites stay.

THE FLIGHT CLOCK

1. T+ 00:00: Liftoff from Pad 2.
2. T+ 02:22: Hot-staging, as Ship 41 lights and separates.
3. T+ 06:36: Super Heavy landing burn starts over the Gulf, with shutdown listed at T+ 07:01.
4. T+ 25:17: Orbital insertion burn starts, then shuts down at T+ 25:36.
5. T+ 34:07: Payload deploy starts; SpaceX lists it complete at T+ 01:04:39.
6. T+ 08:52:37: Deorbit burn starts on one Raptor, then shuts down at T+ 08:52:48.
7. T+ 09:50:30: Landing, after a flip and a step-down from three engines to one, in the Pacific west of Chile.

Between deploy complete and the deorbit burn sits the long coast, about six laps if controllers keep the full plan. Ship 41 is aiming at a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings. Booster 21 is aiming at the Gulf. The chopsticks on the tower are scenery on this one.

The Chopsticks Sit Out This Flight

Neither stage is supposed to be caught. Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months,” after walking back an earlier hope that the next flight might grab the upper stage if regulators allowed it. He also said that if a tower had been waiting at sea on Flight 13, Ship 40 would have been caught.

Monday is still a water landing on both ends, which keeps the tower out of the failure path and leaves the 26 satellites as the part of the mission that can remain in the sky. If insertion is withheld, those V3s fall with the ship, the same way the 20 on July 24 did. If the 19-second burn holds and the single-engine slowdown later works, they start raising their orbits, and Starship has done the job Falcon 9 has been doing for years, with a bigger bird on a taller stack.