SpaceX's Starship set for first orbital flight, will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites

SpaceX is preparing to launch the 14th flight of its Super Heavy-Starship vehicle, a mission that would mark the first time the rocket's upper stage is sent into orbit around Earth. A 75-minute launch window is scheduled to open at 7:15 am Central Time (5:45 pm IST) from Starbase in Texas.

The flight is also set to carry out the first deployment of Starlink V3 satellites, a next-generation design that SpaceX says will significantly expand connectivity speeds and reliability worldwide. Each V3 satellite is built to support 1 Tbps of downlink and 160 Gbps of uplink capacity — a tenfold increase in downlink and a 22-fold increase in uplink compared with the earlier V2 satellites, along with gains in capacity, data density and power generation.

Once released from Starship, the satellites will unfurl their antennas and solar arrays, establish contact with ground stations and the rest of the constellation through radio frequency and laser links, and use onboard thrusters to raise their orbits. SpaceX expects them to begin serving customers as soon as a few weeks after launch, following on-orbit checkouts.

The upper stage is expected to fly at an altitude of about 275 km and complete roughly six orbits over a flight lasting nearly 10 hours, ending with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. Its objectives include the first orbital insertion manoeuvre, the satellite deployment, a deorbit burn using a single Raptor engine and a controlled reentry and descent.

Three of the satellites carry a suite of cameras to scan Starship's heatshield and relay imagery to operators, continuing tests of how to assess the heatshield's readiness for a future return to the launch site. The Super Heavy booster's main test goals are launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback and landing burns at an offshore point in the Gulf of America, with hardware and software changes made after the previous flight.

At 407 feet, Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Both its stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a capability SpaceX has described as the "holy grail of rocketry." The company sees the vehicle as a step towards expanded space exploration, including the possibility of human settlement on the Moon and Mars.