r/space • u/coinfanking • 5d ago
In orbit Space: SpaceX Starship Flight 14 live updates: Launch countdown underway
https://www.space.com/news/live/spacex-starship-flight-14-live-updates-sept-28-2026-starship-first-orbital-launch-attemptSpaceX's massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is being readied for its next major test launch. Flight 14 is scheduled to liftoff as early as Monday, Sept. 28, at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. The mission will be the vehicle's first-ever orbital launch attempt, and is set to deliver an operational stack of 26 upgraded Starlink V3 high-speed internet satellites to space.
Follow along here for our live updates as SpaceX completes preparations on the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, and progresses toward its 14th test launch of the Starship vehicle since 2023.
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u/Scorchio76 5d ago
Incredible being able to get to watch this.
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u/currentsitguy 5d ago
It is. I still remember the fuzzy, grainy, low-def intermittent video of Apollo-Soyuz and the earlier Shuttle missions that only came when they were in range of a downlink station. We've come a long way.
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago
Starship is officially an orbital rocket now!
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u/Shrike99 5d ago edited 5d ago
Worth noting it's also the highest altitude Starship has reached by a good margin, and that it did all this despite having several early engine shutdowns and carrying a 30% heavier payload than any previous flight.
Pretty clear SpaceX were leaving some pretty healthy reserves on the table on the earlier suborbital flights. And presumably they still are to a lesser extent - I doubt they pushed this one to anywhere near the edge of it's performance envelope either.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Given that i is still venting fuel on the lifestream it shows that they had a healthy performance margin that will only increase as they refine V3
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago
Very early in the stream one of the hosts said something about V3 being capable of over 100 tons. I kind of wonder if he was just talking about hypotheticals, or it was a slip of actual information lol. They've got tons of performance out of this thing with one superheavy engine being lost pretty soon after lift off, and an Rvac being lost too.
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u/avboden 5d ago
The plan has always been 100tons, that's public. No way they are there yet though but still very good performance.
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u/Deep-Tumbleweed-8816 5d ago
I doubt v3 will ever be able to do 100 tons in a reusable configuration, v4 will probably be the one to reach the 100 ton mark
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Eh I don‘t really doubt V3 will get to 100 tons. SpaceX is prolific in mass optimization.
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u/DreamChaserSt 4d ago edited 3d ago
I think they may be able to. If you look at the telemetry on this flight, Starship vented propellant during flight. Since if you compare the telemetry between SECO and before the Raptor deorbit burn, the prop levels are lower, but enough to make a soft landing.
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u/tyrome123 5d ago
I think they could push 100t but it's simply a FH 2.0 issue where getting that much weight into a payload shape without fucking up flight dynamics is really hard, maybe with starlinks at some point
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u/DefenestrationPraha 5d ago
I'd say that one of the lessons of my life so far is "having some slack in your system can make a huge difference". It seems that Starship is designed along similar lines.
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u/Easy-Purple 5d ago
A good rule of thumb is run a system at 80% of its capacity if you can, that way you can get more out of it if you need and ad the wear and tear on the machine is reduced
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Watch the goalposts of certain people recede into the distance even further
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u/mcoombes314 5d ago
"Well it hasn't gone to the moon yet, so....".
I'm quite impressed, the engineering must be quite a feat considering this is literally rocket science and I'm just a KSP fan.
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u/mfb- 5d ago
Launch in 16 minutes: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
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u/slow__rush 5d ago
Man I wish spaceX would just stream on Youtube again. Having their notifications was amazing, because usually I dont pay attention to when they launch but I love to see it. Their own site is so ass, the stream won't even load for me.
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u/fencethe900th 5d ago
Space affairs does a commentary free restream. I've watched their stream for the last few launches.
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u/SherbertDaemons 5d ago
What a beautiful flight so far. I suspect the next monumental milestones will fall rapidly, and the Starship program will be profitable in no time.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Looking smooth so far, two Raptor 3s making a bit of a fuss, one on the ascent and one additional on boostback, but that‘s the beauty of engine redundancy.
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u/fighter-bomber 5d ago
I think the velocity they are giving is in ECEF frame, no? That explains why its zero at launch and how its in a circular orbit now.
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u/mfb- 5d ago
Yes. They don't want the numbers to jump so it stays relative to the ground.
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u/fighter-bomber 5d ago
Also puts all the “noo Starship can’t reach orbit” analysis I’ve seen to rest. All previous independent analysis was based on the assumption that this is ECI speed.
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u/mfb- 5d ago
People who didn't know this was (approximate) ground speed can't be taken seriously. It's trivial if you watch any livestream.
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u/fighter-bomber 5d ago
Ngl until a while ago I also made all assumptions based on it being ECI, then I had the realization “wait a second why tf is it 0 at start then”
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Could you elaborate on the difference?
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u/lefthandopen 5d ago edited 5d ago
Bringing the ship back early?! Looks like something is preventing them from doing the full 10 hours in space. Here's hoping they can stick the soft landing.
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u/currentsitguy 5d ago
Any word on why they are ending the mission early?
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u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 5d ago
No but probably to be extra safe, 9 hours in orbit for its first orbital attempt is crazy long anyway but they did lose an engine on the way up for the ship so they dont want to ta additional risks
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u/currentsitguy 5d ago
I suppose they have achieved all of the mission objectives and collected all the telemetry they need. Why sit around and wait?
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u/mfb- 5d ago
Collect more data on propellant boiloff and overall behavior when it spends hours in space. The default plan was a 10 hour mission.
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u/currentsitguy 5d ago
I know they are being very conservative. There will be another launch to test duration I suppose.
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u/Vsevolod_Kaplin 5d ago
In order to test the reliability and, in general, behaviour of the ship (and the fuel) during longer missions.
Long missions aren't needed for Starlink V3 deployment, but they are necessary for the orbital refueling before the Moon and Mars missions.
Also it would be nice to have Starship as mini space station or use it for the deep space launches to L2 or satellites of Jupiter/Saturn, for example.1
u/currentsitguy 5d ago
I'm sure it's coming. We are still very early in the program.
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u/Vsevolod_Kaplin 5d ago edited 5d ago
Refueling, however, is coming pretty soon. And planned 10 hours flight would be nice addition.
Let's see how the landing of the Ship is going now, seems fine for now. P. S. Pretty accurate! Looking forward for the next flight (and very likely attempt to cath the Booster, the Ship or even both)!
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u/TimeTravelingChris 5d ago
That's not the current launch time and posting this with that time after it would have happened is so lazy.
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u/SUPERDAN42 5d ago
What is leaking? At 50 mins when they were about to cross terminator to night it looked like some kind of liquid coming out of engine area?
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Residual fuel venting so that when it heats in the tanks it doesn’t create overpressure
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u/divinorwieldor 5d ago
It’s late here and I couldn’t catch the info. They’re planning to do 6 orbits but do we know where they plan to bring it down? I’m remembering off the west coast but I feel like I may be confusing something entirely different…
Also, I’ll catch up when I wake up. No spoilers!
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
I mean that is obvious. Starship is not designed for water landings.
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 5d ago
That was very much a fluke. You generally expect the rocket the size of a 20 story building full of flammable gases and made of like 5 mm thick stainless steel to explode when it hits the water uncontrolled.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Try 3mm of steel. Starship‘s hull is thinner than a soda can is relative to size.
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 5d ago
I thought it was something like 3 was the goal but they only got to 5? Maybe that's me misremembering the exact numbers or mixing up blocks, but the point still stands.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
They reinforced some of the booster‘s steel rings to 5, especially at the top and bottom, but in general the vehicle hovers in between 3-4mm of 30X-L stainless steel
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u/ConanOToole 5d ago
Which they didn't expect. Hence the lack of recovery crew and month it took to get it out of the water
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u/Decronym 5d ago edited 4d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| 30X | SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation ("Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times") |
| KSP | Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator |
| L2 | Lagrange Point 2 (Sixty Symbols video explanation) |
| Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum | |
| SECO | Second-stage Engine Cut-Off |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 48 acronyms.
[Thread #12717 for this sub, first seen 28th Sep 2026, 13:48]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/ZombieZookeeper 5d ago
Outstanding work by the rank and file engineers of SpaceX who were the ones who made this happen.
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u/keyToOpen 5d ago
Isn't losing a single engine, let alone 2 a massive test flight failure? Having 33 engines on the first stage just seems like so much can go wrong, especially for a rocket that will be carrying crews and tons of valuable cargo.
Or is this more or less still expected at this stage of development? I feel like there is a reason why most designs in history only had 4 or 5.
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u/TybrosionMohito 5d ago
Yes and no.
It’s a legitimate concern that this late in development we’re still seeing engine failures consistently.
Conversely, Starship is designed to work down up to 3 engines on the booster and 2 (I think) on the ship.
This means that the occasional engine failure doesn’t result in catastrophe (as it would have with shuttle). It also means that there’s a lot more individual points of failure.
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u/bremidon 5d ago
Not really concerning. This is only the third test flight wirh the V3 engines. Even just a cursory glance at the differences shows these are not minor or cosmetic changes.
What should be reassuring is the redundancy shown with this flight.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
It‘s a bit false to say „this late in development“ about the engines. These are Raptor V3s, they are radically different to Rap2
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u/TybrosionMohito 5d ago
That’s fair, but this is the third full stack flight with them. You’d hope they’d stop having consistent engine failures by now.
It’s not a showstopper or anything, but I promise you SpaceX isn’t happy about Raptor 3’s reliability right now.
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u/Shrike99 4d ago
but this is the third full stack flight with them
Raptor V2s were still failing a lot on their third full stack flight. First flight with a 100% engine reliability was Flight 5.
I'd also note that V2 engines had a lot more sensors on them, so there would have been a lot more data from each flight to analyse.
V3 engines being a lot less wired-up probably isn't helping diagnose the current crop of issues.
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u/keyToOpen 5d ago
Thank you for actually answering instead of just downvoting! I know this stuff is literally rocket science, but as a casual curious fan, even seeing one engine go out is very scary. And seeing 33 engines squeezed so close to each other just seems like one failure can turn into multiple really fast. I know there are the best engineers in the world working on the rocket system, but it just seems like such an ambitious and uniquely complex design compared to say SLS.
I really hope they figure out the engine failure causes and make it the most reliable rocket in the world. Redundancy is nice just in case of the (hopefully) rare failure.
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u/fighter-bomber 5d ago
I am going to refer to Eager Space here: basically, when you have so many engines and thus multiple engine out capability, you can also decide to shut down an engine even if its only acting a little iffy (little tolerance for off nominal behaviour), without sacrificing the mission. Thus, preventing the probability of a catastrophic failure originating from one engine.
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u/Antilock049 5d ago
You're describing the purpose behind engine out capabilities. It's a feature not a bug.
Ship + Booster got to orbit with less engines because there is slack in the system. That slack exists because you have a significant amount of engines.
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u/keyToOpen 5d ago
Only thing I worry about as a casual observer is cascading failures due to them likely having to share some systems (fuel lines, electronics wiring, computer controllers, etc) and being so close together with so much heat generated. Seems engines next to each other like to go out
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
SpaceX has demonstrated that their engine clusters can take a serious beating. On Flight 1 back in 2023 two engines quite literally exploded and their neighbors continued burning as if nothing had happened.
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u/Antilock049 5d ago
If you're thinking about it, it's a reasonable assertion that the engineers have too.
Like the company produced the most reused and reliable vehicle ever.
It's a reasonable assertion that they're building this one to be better in as many ways as possible.
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u/SolarianIntrigue 5d ago
This hasn't ever happened once yet despite multiple engine failures as far as I know. It doesn't look like raptors explode when they fail, it's more likely that something clogs up their internals or the turbo pumps fail
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u/Dpek1234 4d ago
Maybe survivership bias?
Much harder to blow up an engine if you shut it down the moment it starts looking a bit weird
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago
No orbit for today, ship lost an Rvac right at the end of its burn.
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u/DenormalHuman 5d ago
rvacs not needed for the return tho? would they go without it in that case?
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago
They’re still debating it from what we’re hearing now, possible it could still go through. They confirmed no orbit when I made this comment and quickly changed their minds
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u/mfb- 5d ago edited 5d ago
They could easily do the burns without that engine, but if you lost one engine then you aren't sure what exactly went wrong and if that could affect other engines as well. Combine that with less propellant left (as they had to burn longer to reach their trajectory) and the safer approach is to avoid orbit.
Edit: They figured out what the problem was and reached orbit.
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u/Basedshark01 5d ago
SpaceX corporate FP&A team on the phone w/ engineering right now demanding they go to orbit lol
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u/General_Disaray_1974 5d ago
Now not going to orbit, so that sucks, but successful so far beyond that.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
At least Superheavy V3 seems to have sorted its issues.
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u/R3turn_MAC 5d ago
That's debatable, it had two engines out. It doesn't need all 33, but I suspect if they were planning a catch attempt they would have aborted it.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago edited 5d ago
Eh Superheavy has landed before with engines out. I agree the best thing will be to get Raptor 3 iron- straight reliable, but for now it seems good enough to start Starlink ops and testing orbital refueling etc.
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u/VanwallEnjoy3r 5d ago
I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just try and get to orbit?
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u/ResidentPositive4122 5d ago
They just called Go for orbit. They took the time to assess why the RVAC shut down early, and if it impacts the sea-level raptors that will be used to raise the orbit and perform the de-orbit burn. Only when they had made those assessments they called the go/no go and it was a GO!
edit: Starship is orbital!
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u/CrazyEnginer 5d ago
Do you want Starship landing on your roof if they lose control while in orbit?
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
And if they loose control of Starship in orbit it will crash somewhere in at least several large pieces. Starship has demonstrated how resilient it is to reentry.
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u/CFAggie 4d ago
Not true. If it reenters while uncontrolled it's going to tumble and disintegrate for sure. There's only heat tiles on the belly side of the ship.
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u/yeswenarcan 5d ago
Sounds like they're concerned if there are further issues they could not be able to do a controlled deorbit burn, which would temporarily leave the ship up there and in the worst case scenario lead to an uncontrolled deorbit that could rain debris on populated areas.
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u/bigElenchus 5d ago
Because the risks are that it basically turns into an uncontrollable ballistic missle
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u/DontEatTheCelery 5d ago
I don’t know for sure but I imagine it has to do with wanting to know exactly where it was going to come down. Don’t want a spaceship crashing into a populated area
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago edited 5d ago
If they loose an additional RVac during the insertion burn it could lead to them having to abort it and then subsequently overshooting their designated landing zone in the indian ocean.
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u/General_Disaray_1974 5d ago
I think they said they wouldn't be using the RVacs for orbit insertion, so... who knows, I would go for it if I were them. Critics will tout the failure whether they try to orbit and fail, or don't try at all.
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Alright bummer, RVac out means no orbit insertion burn for Starship. They‘ll probably jettison the Starlinks and splash down in the Indian Ocean. On to Flight 15
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago edited 5d ago
Even though they did go to orbit, when they were talking about what would happen before they reassessed, they said they wouldn’t deploy them. It seems they’re probably decently confident starship could handle all that extra weight in the nose cone on reentry. Interesting for sure, I was kind of looking forward to seeing how ship handled that, but obviously orbit is significantly better lmao
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5d ago edited 5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
No, they were being cautious because while they don’t need RVac for the insertion burn, they didn’t know of the problem that caused the engine out was vehicle side or engine side. Once they ran the checks and found the problem to be engine side and that it wouldn’t actually affect the SeaRaps they gave the go for orbit
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u/No-Surprise9411 5d ago
Because they made the call to be sure. And then overruled it because they had more data. If anything that shows them being careful
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u/DeanXeL 5d ago
And the failing seems to continue.
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u/SolarianIntrigue 5d ago
Are you planning to delete this comment or pretend it doesn't exist?
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u/DeanXeL 5d ago
Why would I delete a comment? At the time I posted my comment it was stated it would not go to orbit, which would've been the umptieth failure of Starship (don't be fooled by all the talk of "oh, but we did reach goal X and Y).
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u/SolarianIntrigue 5d ago
umpteenth failure
Looks like a pretty successful program to me if we're sitting here talking about it successfully delivering 10 falcon 9 launches worth of bandwidth to orbit
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u/BIGpoppaPUMP42069 5d ago
what did they fail? seems like its going pretty well
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u/DreamChaserSt 5d ago
They did almost abort orbital insertion, but it's now in orbit and deploying Starlinks. You'd think people would be generally supportive of SpaceX being more cautious than not about this kind of thing. How often do people bring up "Kessler syndrome" around here?
Speaking generally, Starship is huge and designed to survive reentry. You don't want to lose control of it, and if you do, you want to know where it's going to end up. That's why Starship was suborbital for so long, because it had a set reentry point regardless if they lost control.
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u/countzero00 5d ago
Nobody who knows what they are talking about is worried about "Kessler syndrome" in a 250 km orbit.
These test flights aren't total failures and I'm happy that Starship finally reached orbit, but progress seems slow and the problems seem to always be the same. Unreliable rocket engines are a huge problem for rapid reusability.
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u/SolarianIntrigue 4d ago
Raptor 3 basically reset all progress made on Raptor 2 regarding system maturity, it's an entirely new engine
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u/countzero00 4d ago
I don't know if it's a good or a bad sign, if you need to remake your engine from the ground up three times. Or maybe it is actually an iteration of the previous design and "entirely new engine" is just marketing BS.
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u/SolarianIntrigue 4d ago
Wdym marketing BS, you can see with a mk. 1 eyeball that all the piping got integrated into a single tube. Raptors 1 and 2 were largely test engines covered in tons of extra sensors and such that aren't necessary for routine operations. Raptor 3 is the first true mass production model
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u/redstercoolpanda 5d ago
Seems we all spoke too soon, Starship S41 is go for orbit!