SpaceX's Starship is finally set for orbit. A lot is riding on its success.

By William Gavin

Next week, SpaceX plans for Starship to complete six orbits of the Earth during a nearly 10-hour flight

Starship, a massive rocket, is "core to the rest of our business," according to SpaceX's chief financial officer.

SpaceX on Tuesday announced a new date for its next test of the Starship megarocket, which it intends to finally send into Earth's orbit.

Getting the 407-foot-tall rocket into orbit would be a big accomplishment and would position SpaceX (SPCX) a bit closer to achieving a bevy of goals that rely on the vehicle's development. Prior tests have sent Starship only on "passively safe" suborbital paths, the company said.

The 14th Starship test is scheduled for as soon as Tuesday, Sept. 22, pending regulatory approval. It's the third mission involving the third version of the Starship rocket and its Super Heavy booster vehicle.

Starship is set to fly at an altitude of about 275 kilometers above Earth and complete six orbits around the planet. The mission is expected to last nearly 10 hours before Starship's planned splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, according to the company.

SpaceX said the mission would set up the "next phase" of making Starship fully reusable, which would help it keep costs down and allow it to increase its launch cadence. SpaceX has invested at least $15 billion in the vehicle and will spend at least another $100 billion developing a dedicated spaceport in Louisiana.

While that's a lot of cash to throw around, it also makes sense given the potential value of Starship, which SpaceX plans to use to launch Starlink and artificial-intelligence satellites into orbit. Whether an investment in SpaceX pays off "rests almost entirely" on the company making Starship fully reusable, Pivotal Research Group analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak said in a recent client note.

SpaceX shares were down more than 2% in recent action on Tuesday.

The vehicle is "core to the rest of our business," SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said earlier this month. He also said next week's flight will be the first to generate revenue, since it will carry Starlink V3 satellites to orbit, something he called a "huge milestone."

SpaceX wants Starship to deploy 26 Starlink V3 spacecraft on the flight, each of which will add 1 terabits per second of capacity to the existing Starlink satellite-internet constellation. Together, that will add about 10 times the capacity of a single Falcon 9 launch of smaller satellites, according to the company.

Starlink V3 eventually "will deliver more than 100 times the bandwidth of our current 11,000 satellite constellation," Musk posted to X on Tuesday.

SpaceX has also said the primary goal for Starship's Super Heavy booster is to execute a successful launch, ascent and stage separation, followed by a boostback burn and landing burn in the Gulf of Mexico. The company said it had modified the vehicle's hardware to make its engines more reliable.

During the previous mission, SpaceX said the booster's three center engines showed signs of being clogged by ice, which prevented a successful boostback burn. That's a maneuver that positions the booster to return to a landing site.

The next flight will also be the last mission before SpaceX attempts to "catch the ship" for the first time, Musk said at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. He added that he thinks it is "extremely likely that we will achieve full reusability with rapid reflight" in 2027.

-William Gavin

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09-15-26 1523ET