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Starship
Super Heavy + Ship — a fully reusable stack
Starship is SpaceX’s next launch system, still in flight test. This page is the unofficial briefing on the hardware. The flight-by-flight log lives on Missions.
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Starship | Starlink Group 31-1 (Starship Flight 14)
14th test flight of the two-stage Starship launch vehicle. 3rd flight of Starship V3 and the first Starship flight to deploy satellites (a group of Starlink satellites known as Starlink Group 31-1) into stable Low Earth Orbit. The ship is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km above Earth and complete approximately 6 orbits around the planet for nearly 10 hours, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. The booster’s primary test objective on Flight 14 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf. Starship will deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit for the first time, which aim to greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds. Each Starlink V3 satellite will add 1 Tbps of capacity to the constellation.
Starship V3 · SpaceX Starbase, TX, USA
Open the flight logSuper Heavy
First stage. Dozens of Raptor engines lift the stack, then the booster is meant to fly back and be caught by the launch tower instead of landing on legs.
Starship (the ship)
Second stage and spacecraft. Six Raptors, a heat shield, and a payload bay. Same vehicle is supposed to fly cargo, tankers, crew, Starlink, and later lunar/Mars variants.
The tower
“Chopsticks” on the launch tower catch a returning booster — and, if the program gets there, the ship. Catching is how they want rapid reuse without landing legs.
How to read Starship
What Starship is
Starship is SpaceX’s next launch system: a huge stainless-steel, methane-fueled, fully reusable two-stage rocket. The first stage is Super Heavy. The second stage is also called Starship (or “the ship”). The point is not one spectacular test. It is a vehicle cheap enough to fly often — the same idea that turned Falcon 9 into a cadence machine, pushed to a much larger scale.
Raptor, steel, and methane
Raptor engines burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The tanks and skin are stainless steel, which is heavy compared with carbon composites but simpler to weld, cryo-friendly, and cheap to iterate at Starbase in Texas. Version 3 (V3 / Block 3) flies Raptor 3 engines from the new Pad 2 (OLP-2). Those are the vehicles in the 2026 test series.
Catching, not just landing
Falcon 9 lands on drone ships or ground pads, on legs. Starship’s design is to return Super Heavy to the same tower that launched it and have mechanical arms catch it. That has been demonstrated on earlier flights. It is not attempted on every test — several 2025–26 flights used planned Gulf splashdowns or lost the booster. Catching the ship as well is a later goal, tied to rapid reuse.
What it is for
If reuse works at this size, Starship is the truck for Starlink V3 (on the order of 60 satellites and a terabit-class jump in bandwidth per flight, versus a Falcon 9 V2 mission), NASA’s crewed lunar lander (HLS), tankers for orbital propellant transfer, and eventually Mars. None of those jobs are “done” because a test article flew. They need a vehicle that reaches orbit, comes back, and flies again on a short cycle.
Where the campaign is now
Through summer 2026 the program is in integrated V3 flight test, not operational airline-like service. Flight 12 was the first V3 stack (simulators out, booster not recovered). Flight 13 deployed 20 Starlink V3 spacecraft on a suborbital path — a hardware test, not a constellation launch; those satellites were designed to reenter. Flight 14 is the next integrated test: an Aug 31 FCC STA described an orbital insertion (not a suborbital arc). Catalogs still show a late-September TBD. Vehicles and licenses gate the date, not a calendar promise.
What a test flight is not
A successful test means the objectives for that flight were met. It does not mean Starship is operational, that V3 Starlink is in commercial service, or that a catch will happen next time. Suborbital deployments demise. Orbit, ship catch, and propellant transfer are still ahead on the public roadmap.
Why it matters for SPCX holders
For SPCX holders the question is cadence and cost, not one headline. Starlink V3, HLS, and any orbital compute or tanker architecture assume a reusable ship. The useful live data is which generation is flying (now V3), whether the booster comes back, and whether payload actually reaches a useful orbit — not the flight number alone.
Unofficial website. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to SpaceX or Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Information changes rapidly — verify with primary sources. Nothing on this page is investment advice.