Starship's Pez Dispenser Works: All 26 Starlink Satellites Reach Orbit

Starship's Pez Dispenser Works: All 26 Starlink Satellites Reach Orbit

STARBASE, Texas. Starship's Ship 41 released all 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit Monday morning, SpaceX confirmed, making Flight 14 the first Starship mission to deliver an operational payload to orbit. In July, Flight 13 released 20 satellites on a suborbital path, so they fell back to Earth within minutes.

The ship opened the door of its payload bay and let the satellites out one at a time, much like candy from a giant steel Pez dispenser. The sequence took about half an hour. SpaceX said it had already made contact with the first satellites after they were ejected.

The batch matters because of its size. SpaceX estimates one Starship load carries about ten times the capacity of a Falcon 9 launch of the earlier V2 mini satellites. Twenty-six of the larger V3 satellites rode a single vehicle out of South Texas.

Three of them carry cameras aimed back at the ship's heat shield. Their images will help SpaceX judge whether Starship can return to its launch site on future missions. The rest still need on-orbit checkouts, and SpaceX says customer service could begin within a few weeks.

The flight itself is not finished. Ship 41 is now in a coast phase of about eight hours, with flight controllers reviewing the ship's health at set checkpoints. If all goes to plan, the ship will fire a deorbit burn, reenter, and splash down in the Pacific west of Chile roughly 10 hours after liftoff, which would put it in the late afternoon.

WECU News

I'll update the ending when the ship comes down, with the reentry and splashdown results.

Sources:

• Space.com live updates

• CNN live updates

• Starlust live updates

• Next Spaceflight, Flight 14

• SpaceX, Starship Flight 14

• NASASpaceFlight, Flight 14 preview