Starship reaches orbit for the first time, splashes down early off Hawaii

SpaceX has flown a Starship into orbit for the first time, after 13 earlier suborbital flights, but ended the mission early with a Pacific splashdown north of Hawaii about three hours after launch.

Liftoff from Starbase, Texas, came at 8:49 a.m. EDT. The Super Heavy booster’s 33 Raptor engines powered the 400-foot stack through hot-staging, and the booster then returned for a controlled vertical splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, despite an engine shutting down early during the boost-back burn.

One of the ship’s six Raptor engines shut down on ascent. Flight controllers held for about 20 minutes before clearing an orbit-insertion burn with a single engine, putting Ship 41 into a roughly 275km orbit.

The ship deployed 26 third-generation Starlink satellites, each rated at about 1 Tbps of downlink — roughly ten times what a Falcon 9 load of earlier-generation satellites adds — the first operational satellites ever launched by Starship.

Planned for six orbits and nearly ten hours ending off Chile, the flight was instead ended after about two orbits, splashing down at 11:57 a.m. EDT. The ship re-entered belly-first, flipped vertical for a controlled tail-first splashdown, then tipped over and broke apart as residual propellants ignited — an expected outcome for ocean landings.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on X, calling it a “gorgeous launch”. A Starship variant is slated to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon, targeted at 2028 — though observers doubt that date, with NASA funding a Blue Origin lander as an alternative.

Sources

• Spaceflight Now: https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/09/28/starship-returns-to-earth-rocket-splashes-down-north-of-hawaii-after-three-hour-flight/
• SpaceQ: https://spaceq.ca/starship-flight-14-reaches-orbit-starlink-satellites/
• Teslarati: https://www.teslarati.com/starship-14-orbit/
• Free AstroScience: https://www.freeastroscience.com/starship-flight-14-first-orbit/