Starship is finally going orbital, and SpaceX has picked September 22

Flight 14 is aiming for orbit, Starlink V3 deployment and a very long day in space.

By Varun Mirchandani Published September 15, 2026

Starship rocket. — SpaceX

SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket’s 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.

Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver

This is a pretty big deal, even by Starship standards. The previous 13 flights have followed suborbital trajectories, meaning Starship could reach space but wasn’t actually placed into a stable orbit around Earth. Flight 14 is designed to change that, with SpaceX targeting an orbit roughly 275 kilometers above Earth.

The mission isn’t going up empty-handed either. SpaceX plans to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, marking the first orbital deployment of the company’s next-generation Starlink hardware from Starship. If everything goes according to plan, the mission should last nearly 10 hours, with Starship making roughly six trips around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.

The flight will also test several important pieces of the reusable rocket system, including launch, stage separation, the Super Heavy booster’s boostback and its eventual splashdown. In other words, this isn’t simply a case of getting Starship into orbit and calling it a day. SpaceX is testing the machinery needed to eventually make the entire system reusable and fly it far more frequently.

Starship is finally getting a paycheck

And there’s a fun little milestone hiding in all of this: if successful, this would be the first Starship flight to generate revenue for SpaceX’s launch business, even though the customer is effectively another part of SpaceX.

After years of increasingly ambitious test flights, September 22 could finally be the moment Starship graduates from “massive rocket being tested” to “massive rocket actually doing orbital work.” There is still plenty that can go wrong, and SpaceX is very much treating this as a test, but getting Starship around Earth would mark a significant step toward the fully reusable launch system the company has been building toward.

Varun Mirchandani

Varun is an experienced technology journalist and editor with over eight years in consumer tech media. His work spans…

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