STARBASE, Texas. SpaceX launched Starship Flight 14 from Pad 2 at 7:46 a.m. CDT Monday, the first attempt to place a Starship in Earth orbit. Ship 41 rode atop Super Heavy Booster 21. All 13 earlier flights followed suborbital paths that returned the ship to the ocean after about an hour.
Liftoff was clean, and the vehicle passed the point of maximum aerodynamic stress without trouble. About two minutes in, Super Heavy shut down most of its engines, the ship's Raptors ignited, and the stages separated in a hot-staging maneuver. The booster flipped, burned back toward the Gulf, and made a controlled splashdown, which SpaceX called a success.
Ship 41 finished its ascent burn and shut down its engines. It then coasted on a passively safe path toward the Indian Ocean while mission control checked whether enough hardware remained healthy to carry out a deorbit burn later. SpaceX had said it would fire the insertion burn only if those checks passed. Controllers gave the go, and one Raptor fired briefly to send the ship toward an orbit near 275 kilometers.
The ship carries 26 Starlink V3 satellites, three of them fitted with cameras to image the heat shield. Deployment was scheduled to begin about 34 minutes after liftoff and run for roughly half an hour. If the rest of the mission holds to plan, the ship will complete about six orbits over nearly 10 hours before a splashdown in the Pacific west of Chile.
WECU News
Have a correction or tip? See our
corrections policy or contact the newsroom.
