Three years after the start of test flights, the largest rocket and spacecraft in the history of mankind were declared ready for the first launch into orbit. Moreover, it is planned to be ten-hour at once and with the launch of a large group of new-generation Starlink satellites. In terms of capacity, this launch alone will add as much as ten launches of the Falcon 9, the modern leader in mass-produced terrestrial rocketry.
Since April 2023, Elon Musk's company has made 13 test launches of Starship, making it the record holder for the longest test program among all carriers in history. But this is far from the end of the tests: if the first stage has already been reused, then the second, which is also a spacecraft, has not yet been used.
Meanwhile, the cost of developing the carrier plus the construction of sites for it has already reached $ 15 billion. On the one hand, by American standards, this is a very small amount: the development of Saturn V at modern prices cost $ 40 billion, and with infrastructure — $ 90 billion. The shuttle R&D project cost $60 billion. Against this background, Starship, more powerful than any of these carriers of the past, is inexpensive. However, unlike government programs, Elon Musk does not like to waste money and time.
Now SpaceX has announced that it will try to launch Starship with 26 Starlink V3 satellites on September 22, 2026. The bandwidth of each of them is one terabit per second, so a combined 26 terabits per second from them will add ten times more bandwidth to the largest satellite constellation in history than a regular Falcon 9 launch with a smaller Starlink V2 Mini. Of all the terrestrial carriers, Starlink V3 can only launch Starship, since the rest of the rockets are too small for this.
The launch on September 22 is scheduled for an orbit with an altitude of 275 kilometers. The flight will last almost ten hours and will take six orbits around the Earth. It will be the first orbital for Starship. To avoid risks as much as possible, after eight minutes of flight, the second stage will enter a suborbital trajectory. In case of any problems, the stage will remain on it and then it will quickly enter the atmosphere over the ocean. If all goes well, after 25 minutes from the start of the flight, an additional impulse will put it into a closed orbit.
SpaceX Roles / © SpaceX will unload more than forty tons of payload there for the first half hour. For the next few hours, SpaceX will monitor the evaporation rate of liquid fuel in the tanks and the operation of other systems during a long flight. After the braking pulse, the ship will descend from orbit and after 9 hours and 50 minutes it will gently touch down in the Pacific Ocean.
Technically, the system could have made an orbital flight a long time ago. But Musk avoided him, fearing an accident and falling rocket debris on populated areas. Unlike conventional aluminum rockets, the new one, made of stainless steel, can better tolerate combustion in the atmosphere and reach the surface in the form of larger pieces.Gorenje So the first 13 launches were suborbital. This means that the second-stage ship flew along such a trajectory that, in any accident, it entered the Earth's atmosphere over an open ocean where there were no people without additional control.
Therefore, the new launch signals the developer's great confidence that the system is basically complete and suitable for commercial use. This is exactly what the launch of Starlink satellites will be: SpaceX received $ 11.39 billion from this network last year, or several annual budgets of "Roscosmos". More than 80 percent of these revenues come from civilian consumers. Starlink continues to experience explosive growth: if at the end of 2025 it had only 8.9 million customers, then in September 2026 it was already 14.5 million, and by the end of the year the company expects more than 20 million.
This growth is especially difficult to achieve at a time when the number of Falcon 9 launches is not growing. But the stagnation of their launches is no coincidence: Musk has repeatedly said that he is concentrating on a fully reusable Starship. As he noted in a recent interview, only the first stage of the Falcon 9 is reusable. Other rockets use the first stage, the size of a large airliner, only once. The Falcon 9 uses only the upper stage once, which already stands as a medium-sized airliner for local lines. But even this, according to Musk, is not enough.
Fully reusable according to the Starship project, it has never reused the upper stage. This is not planned for the next flight either: both the first and second stages will be dropped into the ocean, having previously simulated landing on "virtual" landing towers. They do this in order to make sure twice that everything is worked out well. In the last launch in July, the second stage completed such a "landing" perfectly, but the first stage could not restart the engines properly due to ice particles entering the engine. The new test flight will take place with improved filtration systems, which should block a repeat of the incident.
In addition, changes were made to the heat protection of the carrier. Some of its tiles will have a modified shape to prevent plasma from getting under the tile. Other tiles will receive new fasteners. Finally, two of them will be from the previous second stage of the Starship, which fell into the Indian Ocean and was then towed to port. If everything goes well this time, then on the 15th test flight, they will try to catch both the first and second stages on special landing towers.
The importance of the upcoming 14th tests of the system cannot be overestimated. It's not just that Starlink is playing an increasingly important role on Earth — the company has up to eight million customers for direct Internet distribution from satellite to smartphone at certain times. The space prospects of this carrier are more important. It is now quite clear that with it, the US military capabilities in space will increase significantly.
He has even more significant civilian space prospects than military ones. It is Starship that will have to return people to the moon in 2028. At the end of the same year, 2028, SpaceX plans to send five Starships to Mars, where each of them will attempt a fully automatic landing. If something goes wrong, in two more years, several more ships with modifications based on the experience of the first attempt will be sent to the Red Planet. If everything goes well the first time, Musk intends to send people there in the next launch window, that is, as early as 2031.
Alexander Berezin
