SpaceX's Starship to attempt first orbital flight Monday

SpaceX will attempt to send Starship into Earth orbit for the first time Monday (local time) in the rocket's 14th test flight.

CNBC reported that the US Federal Aviation Administration has issued a launch and reentry operations license for Starship's 14th flight.

The launch window opens at 8:15 a.m. Texas time Monday and lasts 75 minutes. The flight had originally been scheduled for Tuesday, but SpaceX announced Sept. 17 via X, formerly Twitter, that it was pushing the date to Monday "pending regulatory approval." No specific reason for the delay was disclosed at the time.

Starship is set to lift off from Starbase, Texas, orbit Earth six times at an altitude of roughly 275 kilometers, and splash down in the Pacific Ocean approximately nine hours and 50 minutes after launch. During the flight, it will deploy 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites into orbit for the first time.

All 13 previous test flights were suborbital, with none targeting actual orbital insertion. Starship is central to SpaceX's satellite communications expansion, which the company sees as a key growth driver. The connectivity segment — which includes Starlink — was the company's only profitable business unit as of the second quarter of this year.

SpaceX currently operates about 11,000 satellites, far ahead of rival Eutelsat OneWeb, which runs a fleet of roughly 650.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, said at an earnings presentation in August that "it's not impossible that Starlink will one day provide most of the world's internet." Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's chief operating officer, said at an event earlier this month that the company plans to use Starship to build "supercomputing in space" and put "AI computing satellites" into orbit next year.

Meanwhile, SpaceX went public on NASDAQ in June through the largest initial public offering in history, reaching a valuation of about $2 trillion. The upcoming flight is expected to serve as a test of both Starship's development progress and the business case underpinning that valuation.

SpaceX plans to use Starship to return American astronauts to the moon after completing key NASA test flights next year.