Starship Reaches Orbit for First Time, Deploys 26 Starlink Satellites

SpaceX's Starship rocket reached orbit for the first time on Monday, marking a long-sought milestone for the vehicle even as an engine failure forced the company to cut the mission short.

The uncrewed stack — a Super Heavy booster topped by the Starship upper stage — lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase site on the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville, Texas. The booster separated and later splashed down in Gulf waters under engine control, a step up from hard landings on two earlier flights, though some of its engines stopped working during descent.

Shortly after the upper stage reached space, one of its three main Raptor engines shut down prematurely. A company spokesperson initially said on the live stream that the craft would not attempt orbit, but engineers soon confirmed a burn was still possible. Starship completed that burn and entered orbit.

Once there, it released 26 next-generation Starlink satellites one by one at an altitude of roughly 269 km. Elon Musk said on X that all 26 had deployed and were operating nominally.

The flight had been scheduled to last about 10 hours and complete six Earth orbits, but the engine issue reduced it to roughly three hours. The shortened timeline made a successful deorbit burn — firing a Raptor engine to angle the vehicle for re-entry — all the more important. The descent is designed to end with the ship flipping vertically to hit the sea nose-up. No recovery was planned for this flight.

Monday's launch was Starship's 14th test flight since 2023 and its first carrying an orbital payload. All 13 previous flights stayed within suborbital space, despite a development effort that has cost more than $15 billion over nearly a decade. Musk had once predicted orbit would be reached in 2022, with satellite deployments to follow in 2023.

The V3 Starlink satellites aboard can handle about 10 times more data than the V2 mini-sats SpaceX currently launches in batches of 20 or 30 on Falcon 9 rockets. Analysts estimate the launch represents hundreds of millions of dollars in projected revenue for the Starlink unit. Musk wants to fly the higher-capacity satellites in groups of 60 once Starship enters routine service, which the company aims to begin later this year.

SpaceX shares, which had risen nearly 9% above their IPO price, were down about 1% on Monday. The company went public in June in a record-setting listing that made it the sixth-largest US company by value and turned Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, into the world's first trillionaire. Its market value stood at $2 trillion as of Friday's close.

Starship is central to NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972 and build a sustained presence there as a step toward Mars. Musk has said he envisions hundreds or thousands of Starship flights a year, and wrote on X on Sunday that the vehicle is "2 to 3 years away from hourly flights."