Thirteen launches in, Starship has still never completed a lap of the planet. That is supposed to change on Flight 14, which SpaceX now says it is targeting for Monday, September 28, with a 75-minute launch window that opens at 8:15AM Eastern Time.
The new date lands six days after the September 22 target the company had previously been working toward. SpaceX announced the delay on X without offering a reason, and attached its standard note that the flight remains subject to regulatory approval. In other words, this is a target, not a commitment.
“Now targeting to launch Starship Flight 14 as early as Monday, September 28, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX wrote on X on September 17.
The date, though, is the smaller part of the story. What matters more is that this launch is intended to accomplish genuine work for the first time.
171 miles up, six orbits, roughly 10 hours
Up to now every Starship test has stayed suborbital, an approach SpaceX has described as a way “to maximize public safety while allowing for maximum learning.” The vehicle would launch, travel most of the way around the globe, and return before finishing a full orbit.
On this flight the plan calls for Starship to reach 171 miles and loop around Earth six times across roughly 10 hours. SpaceX frames the orbital portion as the next milestone on the road to flying real missions with the vehicle and demonstrating that it can be reused.
Another change from the last several flights: there will be no catch attempt this time. The Super Heavy booster is scheduled to splash down a few minutes after liftoff in the Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of America in 2025. The upper stage will complete its orbits before coming down in the Pacific Ocean off Chile.
The first customer-serving Starlink V3 satellites
Also on board are 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and that is the detail worth watching. Starship carried the next-generation satellites for the first time on the previous test, but that outing was purely a capability check: the satellites deployed their solar arrays and antennas, communicated with the rest of the constellation, and then burned up on re-entry.
The 26 units flying on Flight 14 are meant to remain in orbit and serve customers. That would make this the first occasion V3 hardware becomes part of the operational Starlink network.
The performance leap is substantial. A single V3 satellite can deliver 1 Tbps of downlink, 10 times the capacity of a V2 satellite, along with 160 Gbps of uplink, a 22-fold increase over V2. Whether users notice any difference at their dish will come down to how many of these SpaceX manages to launch, and Starship is the only vehicle in its fleet capable of carrying them.
Anyone wanting to follow along can catch SpaceX’s stream on its X account. Mark 8:15AM Eastern on the 28th, and don’t be shocked if the date shifts once more.