SpaceX's Starship-Super Heavy rocket reached orbit for the first time on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, a milestone the company had pursued across thirteen earlier suborbital test flights.

The 400-foot-tall vehicle lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site on the Texas Gulf Coast at 8:49 a.m. EDT. The Super Heavy booster's 33 methane-burning Raptor engines produced roughly 16 million pounds of thrust — about twice the power of NASA's Space Launch System — before the stages separated in a 'hot staging' maneuver about two minutes and 20 seconds into the flight.

The climb was not flawless. One of the Starship upper stage's six Raptor engines shut down early during the ascent, and a second engine shut down early during the booster's boost-back burn. After reviewing telemetry, flight controllers judged the ship healthy and used a single Raptor for a second burn that completed orbit insertion. The booster flew itself back and made a seemingly normal vertical splashdown a few miles off the Texas coast.

Roughly eight and a half minutes after reaching orbit, a Pez-style dispenser in the ship's nose released 26 third-generation Starlink satellites, each with about ten times the capacity of the previous generation. It was the first time the vehicle was used to place operational satellites in low Earth orbit.

With the payload safely away, mission managers chose to end the flight early. Instead of the planned six orbits and a splashdown off Chile, the Starship re-entered, flipped vertical and made a controlled, tail-first splashdown in the Pacific north of Hawaii at 11:57 a.m. EDT — about three hours after launch. As is typical of ocean landings, the craft tipped over and was destroyed as residual propellants ignited.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated the company on X, calling it a 'gorgeous launch' and saying the agency was 'excited to help where we can and for Starship missions to become routine.'

The stakes reach well beyond the test program. SpaceX is building a lunar variant of Starship to serve as the lander for NASA's Artemis program, with a crewed landing targeted for 2028. Reaching that date would require up to roughly 15 Super Heavy-Starship tanker flights to refuel the lander in Earth orbit before it departs for the Moon — a cadence of launches within days of one another that SpaceX has never attempted. Many veteran observers doubt the company can certify a human-rated lander in time, and NASA is hedging with a parallel lander from Blue Origin.

In the nearer term, Artemis III — a low-Earth-orbit docking demonstration with prototype landers from both SpaceX and Blue Origin — is planned for next year. SpaceX operates two Starship pads at Starbase and is building three more in Florida, including one at the Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A; an initial Florida launch is targeted for late this year or early next.

Sources