SpaceX’s massive Starship is finally going to orbit — and the effects could be seismic

By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — People near the sandy shores of Texas’ southernmost coastline are accustomed to the earth-shattering roar of the most powerful rocket ever made: Since 2023, various prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship have taken flight from the area 13 times — with nearly half ending in some form of unintended explosion.

But the stakes are about to get even higher.

On Monday, SpaceX will attempt to launch Starship to orbit for the first time, allowing it to deploy the inaugural batch of a new generation of Starlink internet satellites. Liftoff is expected during a 75-minute launch window that will open at 8:15 a.m. ET.

If successful, Monday’s test flight could mark a monumental step forward — signifying that Starship may soon leave its test flight phase and enter full operation.

As Starship crosses that threshold, the ripple effects for the broader space industry are expected to be seismic.

Starship is set to deploy a host of new space-based technologies, including the upgraded Starlink satellites designed to boost the capacity of SpaceX’s global internet business and orbital data centers that CEO Elon Musk hopes will power energy-sucking AI models.

The promises only grow bolder from there: Starship has a multibillion-dollar contract to carry NASA astronauts to the moon’s surface — perhaps for the first time since the Apollo program — amid a new space race with China. And Musk continues to harp on his long-shot vision of using the gargantuan launch vehicle to create a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Since Starship test flights began, dating back to brief “hop” tests in 2019, those goals have seemed far beyond the horizon. But Monday’s flight, if successful, will mark the beginning of a new phase in the vehicle’s development — and introduce a host of new risks.

For the past 13 test flights, SpaceX intentionally placed Starship in a “passively safe suborbital trajectory,” the company acknowledged in a blog post. This meant that “even if control over the spacecraft was completely lost, it was already on a path to reenter the atmosphere and splash down in a pre-determined location.”

As Starship attempts to reach orbit for the first time, the vehicle will lose that safety net. It will be traveling at such high speeds and at a precise trajectory that it will enter free fall around the planet, meaning that— if it loses control — it can’t be easily dragged back down to Earth.

Reaching orbit will offer Starship a dazzling array of new possibilities, perhaps allowing it to deploy functional satellites for the first time as well as pave the way for future exploration deeper into space.

But missteps pose new threats. SpaceX has said Starship will fly well below crewed space stations, noting the ship’s altitude will be about 171 miles (275 kilometers), while the International Space Station orbits around 200 miles (400 kilometers) and China’s Tiangong station operates above 210 miles (340 kilometers). However, if Starship loses control while in orbit, the rocket could collide with active satellites or other valuable equipment.

That’s why, the company said it may abort a planned engine burn — keeping Starship on a suborbital flight path — if there are any hints of malfunction in the early minutes of Monday’s flight.

“There’s so many things that can go wrong,” said Joseph Gonzalez, an associate professor of practice in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois. “With your propellant systems — maybe you have a leak, you might have a freeze over of one of your bows, so maybe your engines are not igniting. Then you essentially just have a dead object that’s in orbit that can pose a risk.”

Meanwhile, SpaceX is grappling with a host of engineering challenges, even as it sets the stage for this unprecedented vehicle to reshape the launch industry and, possibly, humanity’s future in the cosmos.

A pivotal, 10-hour test

Monday’s mission, while expected to deploy operational satellites for the first time, is still considered a test flight. And SpaceX will actively be vetting recent changes it has made to the vehicle.

During the last test mission in July, the Super Heavy rocket booster — which gives Starship its first burst of power off the launchpad — was only able to relight eight of its 13 engines during the moments before it practiced an upright landing into the Gulf.

That problem didn’t affect the mission’s overall success, but making a controlled, safe touchdown is crucial to Starship’s long-term capabilities, because the company hopes to recapture the rocket back at its launch tower in order to refly the rocket repeatedly.

SpaceX said it has made several tweaks, including “hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability,” to solve the Super Heavy booster’s lingering engine issues. Nevertheless, Super Heavy will not return to dry land but once again attempt a practice landing over the ocean.

Meanwhile, the upper Starship spacecraft, which is also referred to as the “ship,” will power up its own engines and continue flying on a suborbital trajectory. As a safety precaution, SpaceX said it will then spend about 20 minutes vetting the spacecraft, ensuring the systems that can guide it back for a safe landing are working — and that the backups to those systems are functioning — before firing up the ship’s engines once more to enter Earth orbit.

Most of Starship’s test flights so far have run just over an hour, and all were flown on a suborbital trajectory. But on Monday, the spacecraft may stay aloft for nearly 10 hours, deploying its batch of 26 Starlink satellites and completing six laps around the planet.

The ship will then attempt to guide itself safely back through the atmosphere and complete an upright, controlled landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile.

As with the Super Heavy booster, the ship’s controlled descent is crucial — aiming to pave the way for future attempts to land the vehicle back in the arms of its launch tower so it can later be flown again.

SpaceX has never attempted this move before. Musk previously hinted that SpaceX might attempt such a maneuver on Monday’s test flight, but the company ultimately opted against doing so.

“What we’re most concerned about is if the ship were to break up over land and rain debris on people,” Musk said during an appearance this month at the All-In Summit, a technology conference. “Our popularity would diminish very rapidly.”

(Starship spacecraft abruptly exploded and rained debris over and near populated areas in Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, respectively, during two consecutive test flights in 2025. Some residents were furious.)

The upper portion of a two-stage, orbital rocket has never before been recaptured and flown again, and much remains to be seen.

The ship must endure grueling temperatures — perhaps topping 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 Celsius) — as it plunges back into Earth’s atmosphere. And SpaceX is still tweaking the special coating on the spacecraft’s exterior, called the heat shield, that’s meant to keep the vehicle intact during reentry.

“When you’re going orbital, you’re going to subject your heat shield to even slightly hotter temperatures than with suborbital test flights,” Gonzalez said. “So this next flight will tell us a lot. Reentry will be an even more harsh experience than what we previously had on these launches.”

Gonzalez noted that images of Starship’s heat shield from earlier flights showed concerning charring, which SpaceX must limit for Starship to survive plunging back into Earth’s atmosphere at orbital speeds more than once.

Unprecedented engineering

Figuring out how to land and refly both the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft is integral to SpaceX’s long-term vision for this vehicle.

SpaceX engineers refer to this capability as the “holy grail” of rocketry. Typically whole or large parts of rockets are discarded after each flight, but reusing them can drive down the cost per mission. Never has an entire launch vehicle been reused, from top to bottom — and SpaceX imagines doing so will lower the price of getting cargo to orbit by orders of magnitude.

Only such a rocket can pave the way for the future that Musk — and other space visionaries — hope for, with colonies of people living and working in space.

Musk first began mapping out the idea for Starship in the mid-2010s. He cycled through names that included the “Interplanetary Transport System” and BFR, for “Big F—ing Rocket,” while occasionally acknowledging the concept “is so preposterously difficult that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this,” as he admitted at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit in 2021.

And the idea has evolved through the years, only solidifying into a towering, steel form when SpaceX began full-scale test flights in 2023. But even since then, the company has churned through various versions of the vehicles.

Only now, with Starship Version 3, or V3, does Musk believe SpaceX has landed on the correct iteration.

“The design is capable of full reusability,” he said this month — marking one of the first times he’s expressed such full-throated confidence. “Of that I am certain.”

Still, daunting engineering hurdles lie ahead.

While Musk has indicated that he’s pleased with the performance of the latest version of Starship’s heat shield, SpaceX is still collecting data. A few of the Starlink satellites on board Monday’s flight will be equipped with cameras, enabling them to peer back at Starship’s exterior as they’re deployed and analyze the heat-resistant tiles.

Apart from the reusability question, SpaceX is staring down a few other unprecedented engineering problems as it looks to prepare Starship for deep-space exploration.

For example, to achieve a lunar landing for NASA, Starship must be refueled while it sits in near-Earth orbit before it heads to the moon. Doing so requires transferring super-chilled propellants, which must be kept at temperatures colder than minus 260 F (minus 162 C), between multiple Starship spacecraft in space.

Such a feat has never been attempted in the history of spaceflight. SpaceX would have to accomplish this propellant transfer perhaps a dozen or more times for a single moon mission.

A high-flying future

As Starship begins to enter operations, if Musk’s vision holds true, it could mean drastic changes for some communities here on Earth.

Already, residents near SpaceX’s South Texas company town, called Starbase, are grappling with the impact of watching the largest rocket ever built take off from their backyards a few times per year. Sonic booms can be as loud as gunshots and vibrations can register as small earthquakes.

While some locals embrace SpaceX’s presence, a group of residents filed a lawsuit in April alleging that Starship flights cause property damage. (The company has argued that even if the residents can prove damages were related to Starship, the impact was unintentional.)

“I have family that live in Brownsville, Texas, and they’re like, ‘Our walls are shaking every time this launch happens,’” Gonzalez said, referring to the South Texas city that lies west of SpaceX’s Starbase.

“I love it,” Gonzalez said of the launches, “but they’re not as big of fans.”

And Musk envisions dramatically ramping up Starship’s launch cadence. He aims for the vehicle to soon begin launching once or twice per month — and eventually, as often as once an hour.

To reach that frequency, SpaceX is expanding its operations to two additional locations: first to Florida’s Space Coast, which is already home to the busiest spaceports in the world across NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX then is aiming to build a $100 billion launch complex in southern Louisiana — a state that has never hosted an orbital rocket launch.

“Starbase Louisiana will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day and making it the biggest launch site on Earth!” Musk said on his social media platform, X, shortly after the August announcement.

While the goals may seem outlandish — and Musk frequently underestimates how long it will take SpaceX to achieve certain milestones — engineering experts frequently point to the company’s deep well of talent and proven track record of solving daunting technical challenges as evidence the company will one day realize its bold ambitions.

Doubt expressed by SpaceX critics often has not aged well. A decade ago, industry experts were skeptical that the company could figure out how to reuse parts of its Falcon 9 rocket. Now it’s the most frequently launched rocket in the world, by far, and has transformed how other rocket makers approach design and development.

However, SpaceX has made it clear that as Starship ramps up, flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets will wind down.

The result is expected to have sweeping implications for the broader space industry — and not all the effects are well understood.

This transition period is already spurring a “panic,” as one analyst called it, as the loss of the Falcon 9 could create a bottleneck for commercial space companies looking to get payloads to orbit.

And there’s no guarantee Starship will fill that void, as SpaceX has not publicly spoken about selling space aboard the rocket to commercial customers.

Robert Sproles, CEO of Germany-based launch broker and integration services companies Exolaunch, told CNN that he believes some reactions to Falcon 9’s retirement may be alarmist — but there is little doubt that demand for launches is outpacing supply.

This demand is bound to drive prices up, Sproles said, “and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.”

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