SpaceX Targets Sept. 22 for First Orbital Starship Flight

SpaceX is preparing for what company documents describe as its most ambitious test flight to date. Liftoff from the Starbase facility in South Texas is slated for a 75-minute window opening at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time) on September 22, pending regulatory sign-off, according to the source articles. Standing 408 feet tall (124 meters tall), the Starship vehicle has completed 13 previous missions, all of which remained suborbital. The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Starship, which debuted in April 2023 and has flown twice so far in 2026.

By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin, SpaceX wrote in a Flight 14 mission description.

This will also mark the first time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that will dramatically expand connectivity speeds and reliability around the world, the company added.

Flight 14 Profile and Orbital Trajectory

Unlike previous suborbital missions where Ship stayed aloft for just 65 minutes or so and came down in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia, Flight 14 aims to place the 171-foot-tall (52-meter-tall) upper-stage Ship into an Earth orbit. If the profile goes according to plan on September 22, Ship will complete six orbits of Earth at an altitude of about 171 miles (275 kilometers) before executing a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about 10 hours after launch, SpaceX wrote in the mission description. The Super Heavy booster will follow its familiar path, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. SpaceX confirmed that neither the booster nor Ship will be caught by the launch tower’s mechanical arms during this test.

CEO Elon Musk walked back earlier plans to attempt a tower catch of the upper stage, noting that an explosion at this stage of development would be too big a setback for the company, and the booster showed engine-relight trouble on the previous flight. Instead, engineers have outfitted three of the craft launching on Flight 14 with cameras to photograph the heat shield on Starship’s upper stage after deployment. SpaceX will use this imagery to study and potentially improve the heat shield, which protects Ship during its return trip through Earth’s atmosphere.

Starlink V3 Deployment and Network Capacity

The upcoming launch carries a payload of up to 26 Starlink V3 satellites—the first operational cargo placed on a Starship flight and the first Starship cargo with revenue attached. The broader Starlink network of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft, but none of those are the larger, more capable V3 version, which are designed to launch on Starship. Each V3 satellite is designed to support 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity, about 10 times what the current generation delivers. SpaceX has framed the per-launch payoff, noting that a full load of V3 satellites should add about 20 times the network capacity of a Falcon 9 launch of today’s satellites.

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With subscriber figures ending June at 12.0 million (twice the year-ago count), keeping up that pace will likely take much bigger capacity additions than the current satellites provide. Company founder and CEO Elon Musk has stated an eventual goal of the company wanting the Starlink megaconstellation to eventually consist of 100,000 V3 satellites, a buildout that depends entirely on Starship’s heavy payload capacity. July’s Flight 13 deployed 20 production V3 satellites and achieved all of its flight objectives, according to SpaceX, but like every Starship test so far, it stopped short of orbit, so those satellites never joined the working network.

Financial Stakes and Research Spending

Starship’s costs land in SpaceX’s space segment, home of the launch business. Segment revenue rose 29% from a year earlier to $962 million in the second quarter of 2026, helped by more large customer launches, according to the source articles. Despite the revenue growth, the segment still posted a $542 million operating loss, however, wider than the $369 million loss a year earlier. The driver is research and development (R&D).

Space R&D spending climbed from $693 million in the year-ago quarter to $930 million in the first quarter of 2026 and nearly $1.1 billion in the second. SpaceX said in its August earnings release that it kept accelerating those investments because it believes Starship will reduce the cost to orbit by 99% or more relative to the historical average and unlock revenue potential across the whole business. Meanwhile, SpaceX put 1,041 metric tons into orbit across 78 launches in this year’s first half, the bulk of it Starlink hardware.

Market Valuation and Investor Outlook

Ahead of the scheduled flight, SpaceX (SPCX) stock rose about 5% on Tuesday, coming on the heels of no new news, though a couple of catalysts may be at work, closing at 150.88 with a gain of +7.39 (+5.15%) at September 16 at 4:00:00 PM EDT, with the company’s market value near $2 trillion. Yahoo Finance reported that investor optimism surrounding the test launch underpins the economics of Starlink deployment, commercial cargo launches, and the company’s lunar ambitions.

Earlier on Tuesday, SpaceX investor Ron Baron talked about the Starlink business in an interview with CNBC. I think Starlink alone could be a trillion dollars in revenue in 10 years, Baron said. And if you look at the margins, $700 billion, $800 billion of EBITDA. And you put a multiple on that, that would support a $14 trillion, $15 trillion valuation.

In addition, Musk has hinted at the possibility of some merger activity among members of the “Muskonomy—Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX. Speaking at the All-In Summit, Musk said it was a great question whether the two companies would remain separate despite several avenues for collaboration. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas,” he said. Yahoo Finance reached out to SpaceX regarding Musk’s comments about a possible merger, but did not immediately hear back, noting it’s not the first time Musk has spoken of this possibility, with reports suggesting he had openly discussed the possibility of a merger between the two companies prior to SpaceX’s June IPO, as reported by Pras Subramanian, Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance.