Starship's Flight 14 Launches Monday, September 28

SpaceX has scheduled the launch of its Starship rocket for Monday, September 28, at the earliest, on a mission designated Flight 14, the vehicle’s first attempt to reach a full orbit of Earth. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central Time (12:15 UTC, 2:15 p.m. in Belgrade) and runs for 75 minutes, closing at 8:30 a.m. Central (3:30 p.m. Belgrade time), according to Teslarati. Liftoff is planned from Pad 2 at Starbase in South Texas, and the company is still waiting on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which according to the latest reports has not yet granted approval.

All 13 Starship flights to date have been suborbital: the rocket reached the edge of space and came back down within about an hour, without ever completing a real loop around the planet. Flight 14 is meant to change that. Ship 41 plans a brief engine burn to enter orbit roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, followed by about six trips around Earth at an altitude of roughly 275 kilometers, on a flight that lasts nearly ten hours from start to finish. The previous flight, Flight 13, carried 20 third generation Starlink satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 satellites are meant to stay up and join the network over the coming weeks, adding roughly 26 terabits per second of capacity to the constellation, Teslarati reports. Three of the 26 satellites carry cameras meant to record any damage to the ship’s heat shield while it is in orbit.

Assembly of the rocket wrapped up early on Wednesday, September 23, when the 52 meter tall Ship 41 was lifted by the launch tower’s cranes onto the Super Heavy B21 booster. The fully stacked rocket, standing 124 meters tall, has been sitting on the pad ever since. The next day, Thursday, SpaceX completed a wet dress rehearsal, filling and then draining the propellant tanks without igniting the engines, so engineers could catch any leaks or faults ahead of time.

The ship’s heat shield picked up new attachment points and curved tiles at spots that took the most heat on earlier flights, and areas where hot plasma had previously worked its way under the tiles were also repaired. Two of the tiles came straight off Ship 40, the first time part of a heat shield has been reused. The B21 booster got improved engine filtering and new relight software, after ice clogged three of the center engines on the previous booster and left only eight of its 13 engines available to relight for landing.

After the mission, Ship 41 is expected to come down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new splashdown zone replacing the Indian Ocean used until now, while Booster 21 is targeting the Gulf of Mexico. Neither part of the rocket will be caught by the launch tower this time, even though Elon Musk said in August that catching the ship with the tower could resume within a few months.

When exactly does Starship launch on Monday?

The window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central Time, 2:15 p.m. in Belgrade, and closes 75 minutes later. That is the timeframe SpaceX has available on September 28, but the date still depends on FAA approval. As of the latest reports, the federal agency had not issued a launch license, even though a temporary flight restriction over Starbase, covering altitudes up to 10,000 feet, has been in place since September 23 and runs through October 7.

Alongside a photo of the fully stacked rocket at dawn, SpaceX wrote on X on September 23:

“Sunrise over Starbase. Plans are in place to take advantage of the opportunity to test the fully stacked rocket ahead of Flight 14, which remains on track for Monday, September 28, pending regulatory approval.”

Flight 14 is thus riding on paperwork as much as on hardware. The company has a stacked rocket on the pad and a completed fueling test behind it, but the orbital attempt, the first in the program’s history, still depends on the FAA’s sign-off and on successfully running through a sequence of steps no earlier Starship flight has had to complete, from igniting engines in orbit to two separate splashdowns on opposite sides of the world.