--- title: "Starship Reaches Orbit on Its Fourteenth Try, One Engine Down" description: "SpaceX’s 400-ong foot rocket finally left the safety net behind over South Texas, carrying 26 Starlink satellites that matter" author: "Inez Holloway" published: 2026-09-28T16:17:28Z modified: 2026-09-28T17:17:45Z url: https://rews.cc/a/on-monday-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-loses-its-safe-4d95a8 language: en tags: ["space", "starship", "spacex", "starlink", "ai", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Starship Reaches Orbit on Its Fourteenth Try, One Engine Down *SpaceX’s 400-ong foot rocket finally left the safety net behind over South Texas, carrying 26 Starlink satellites that matter* By Inez Holloway · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/on-monday-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-loses-its-safe-4d95a8 ## In brief - Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time on its 14th test flight, launching from Starbase, Texas - The ship reportedly lost one of six upper-stage Raptor engines after stage separation but completed insertion - Flight plan called for a 275 km orbit, six laps of Earth, ~10 hours aloft, and deployment of 26 Starlink V3 satellites - Both booster and ship targeted ocean splashdowns; SpaceX declined to attempt a landing-tower catch - Musk said breaking up over land would diminish SpaceX’s popularity “very rapidly,” citing 2025 debris incidents The people who live near the sandy flats at the southern edge of Texas know the sound. Since 2023, various prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship have lifted off from Starbase thirteen times, and nearly half of those flights ended in some form of unintended explosion. On Monday morning the fourteenth attempt went up inside a 75-minute window that opened at 8:15 a.m. Eastern, and this one was different from the start. This one was meant to stay up. It did. “Starship is orbital,” mission control announced to cheers on the livestream, according to Al Jazeera, and with those three words the most powerful rocket ever built crossed the line between a vehicle that merely reaches space and one that can actually remain there. For every previous flight, SpaceX had deliberately kept the upper spacecraft on what the company itself calls a “passively safe suborbital trajectory” — meaning that even if control were lost entirely, the ship was already falling back toward a pre-determined patch of ocean. Orbit offers no such courtesy. At roughly 28,000 kilometers per hour, as Gadget Review explained, a vehicle in free fall around the planet cannot simply be dragged back down. SpaceX had said before flight that it would scrub the final engine burn and keep the ship suborbital if anything looked wrong in the early minutes. Something did look wrong, and the burn happened anyway. According to Gadget Review, Flight 14 lost one of its six upper-stage Raptor engines shortly after stage separation. The anomaly reportedly prompted SpaceX to briefly call off the orbital attempt before deciding to press on with the remaining five engines, and the vehicle completed insertion into a 275-kilometer orbit. It is worth being precise about the footing here: no verified primary-source statement or telemetry release has yet confirmed either the engine failure or the temporary cancellation and resumption. What is not in dispute is the outcome “...one engine down, reportedly, and still going. The plan, from there, was long. Where the thirteen earlier flights each ran about an hour, Flight 14 was built to last nearly 10 hours — six laps of the Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles, comfortably below the International Space Station’s 200 miles and China’s Tiangong station above 210, during which the ship was to dispense 26 Starlink V3 satellites. The newer, larger version of the satellites that generate the majority of SpaceX’s revenue. CNN’s earlier preview of this flight noted the stakes; the supplied reporting after insertion said all 26 were deployed successfully, though Gadget Review cautions that outcome has not been independently confirmed. On the last flight, in July, the ship placed 20 Starlink V3 satellites on a suborbital trajectory and watched them reenter the atmosphere shortly after. Suborbital cargo is a rehearsal. Orbital cargo is a business. Neither stage was ever coming back to land. SpaceX opted against trying to catch the Super Heavy booster in the arms of its launch tower; the booster was to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf, the ship in the Pacific off the coast of Chile. The caution has a history. In 2025, Starship spacecraft exploded and rained debris over and near populated areas in Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas on two consecutive flights. Some residents were furious. Elon Musk, speaking at the All-In Summit this month, put the company’s thinking plainly. > What we’re most concerned about is if the ship were to break up over land and rain debris on people. Our popularity would diminish very rapidly. The engineering ledger going in was not clean. On the July flight, the Super Heavy booster managed to relight only eight of its 13 engines in the moments before its practice landing; SpaceX said it had made “hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability.” Gadget Review reports the booster’s simulated water landing this time was cleaner than previous attempts — which is not the same thing as a booster caught at the tower and flown again. The ship’s heat shield, which must survive reentry temperatures topping 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and then survive them again, carried upgrades: additional retention mechanisms on tiles judged most likely to fall off during ascent, curved tiles to reduce heating in the gaps, and, for the first time, two hexagonal tiles recovered from Ship 40 after its pristine July touchdown in the Indian Ocean and transferred to Ship 41. A rocket that flies its own spare parts. This is what the company means by rapid reusability, or what it calls “the holy grail of rocketry.” The financial scaffolding around all of this is unusually exposed. According to Business Insider, SpaceX reached a $2 trillion market valuation after a record-breaking public listing in June, a figure that rests on Starship flying regularly — Musk has said as often as once a day within the next year. The company has filed plans for 100,000 Starlink satellites, up from roughly 11,000, and executives estimate a fully reusable Starship could cut launch costs by a factor of ten over Falcon 9. Beyond that: orbital data centers, as many as a million of them, on Musk’s stated bet that training large language models in space will give SpaceX an edge in the AI race; a multibillion-dollar NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon; and, in the Qatari-gazan distance, a self-sustaining city on Mars. Also a $100 billion spaceport planned for Vermilion Parish, Louisiana — “Starbase, Louisiana” — where construction is expected by the end of next year with a first launch targeted for 2029, and where SpaceX wants to fly thousands of times a year. Louisiana has never hosted an orbital launch. What Monday bought, then, was one line in a longer ledger. Repeatable orbital insertion remains unproven. Controlled reentry and recovery of the ship remains unproven. The booster catch, the orbital propellant transfers that NASA’s lunar lander architecture depends on — unproven. The holy grail of rocketry is not orbit. It is coming home, over and over, cheaply enough that the arithmetic of a trillion-dollar company holds. On Monday the rocket reached the top of its arc and did not fall. The falling, for now, is scheduled for the Pacific Ocean, off Chile, far from anyone who might be standing under it. ## Sources - [SpaceX's Starship set for unprecedented orbital test flight](https://cnn.com/2026/09/28/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-14-launch) — cnn.com - [Why Starship's riskiest launch yet is such a big deal for Elon Musk's SpaceX](https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starship-launch-orbit-starlink-mission-risk-important-2026-9) — Business Insider - [The most powerful rocket ever built is on the verge of its biggest — and riskiest — test yet](https://cnn.com/2026/09/27/science/spacex-starship-orbital-launch) — cnn.com - [SpaceX's Starship rocket reaches orbit for the first time](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/28/spacexs-showpiece-starship-rocket-reaches-orbit-for-first-time) — aljazeera.com - [SpaceX's Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time on Flight 14](https://gadgetreview.com/spacexs-starship-finally-reached-orbit-and-it-didnt-go-completely-to-plan) — gadgetreview.com - [SpaceX’s massive Starship is finally going to orbit — and the effects could be seismic](https://yahoo.com/tech/science/articles/spacex-massive-starship-finally-going-175134185.html) — yahoo.com