Elon Musk

Starship is preparing to go to orbit. And I really don’t think people understand how significant this flight is about to be. SpaceX is targeting Starship Flight 14 for as early as Tuesday, September 22, pending regulatory approval. Yes, we’ve watched Starship launch 13 times already. But this one is VERY different. Every Starship flight before this was intentionally kept on a suborbital path. That meant even if SpaceX completely lost control of Ship after its engines shut down, gravity was already bringing it back to Earth. This was intentional. The SpaceX team has spent 13 flights learning how to build this... and Flight 14 is where they start learning how to USE it. For the first time ever, Starship is planning to actually enter orbit around Earth. Starship will initially fly the same kind of safe suborbital path SpaceX has used before. Then, only after the team confirms the vehicle is healthy enough to later bring itself back down, Starship is planning to light a Raptor engine again in space and push itself into orbit. This is huge bc now SpaceX is proving it can decide when to enter orbit… stay there… and later decide when to leave it. The plan is for Starship to fly roughly 275 km above Earth, circle the planet about SIX times, spend nearly 10 hours in space, then perform a deorbit burn and splash down in the Pacific west of Chile. Bro... we went from watching Starship flights that lasted around an hour… to now a spacecraft potentially spending nearly half a day circling Earth. And on top of this, SpaceX plans to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites in orbit, like REAL satellites. And EACH V3 is designed to provide roughly 1 Tbps of downlink capacity... which means Flight 14 will launch 26 Tbps of designed Starlink capacity in just ONE Starship flight. And SpaceX says Starship is eventually expected to carry as many as 60 V3 satellites per launch. This is why Starship matters so much... this vehicle is going to completely change how much stuff humanity can put into space, how often we can do it, and how much it costs. I'm talking Starlink V3, massive AI satellites, space stations, moon hardware, fuel, cargo, eventually humans... and ultimately Mars. None of that vision works at the scale SpaceX wants without getting very, very good at orbit with Starship. That’s why Starship Flight 14 is a big deal. I see it as, Flight 1 through Flight 13 were about proving pieces of Starship. • Can it launch? • Can the stages separate? • Can the ship survive hypersonic reentry? • Can Super Heavy come back? • Can SpaceX catch a booster with a freaking tower? One by one, they’ve been attacking those problems. And now comes one of the biggest steps yet... • Can Starship operate like an actual spaceship? 1/ Reach orbit 2/ Carry a useful payload 3/ Deploy it 4/ Spend hours in space 5/ Restart an engine 6/ Leave orbit on command 7/ Survive coming home This is a COMPLETELY different level of mission. This is next level bc Starship is beginning the transition from an experimental rocket we watch being tested, into an orbital transportation system SpaceX intends to actually use very soon. We’ve spent years watching SpaceX teach Starship how to fly and now the team is preparing to teach it how to live in space. Flight 14 is a BIG one!