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5,000-Ton Starship Enters Orbit as Humanity’s Largest Rocket Starts “Delivering Packages”
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- DeepHorus
At 20:49 Beijing time on September 28, 2026, SpaceX’s Starship lifted off from the Starport in Texas for its 14th flight-test mission. This was the first Starship launch aimed at orbital insertion and the first time this rocket type had sent a commercial payload into space. This milestone marked the official entry of humanity’s largest launch vehicle into commercial operations. Exactly 18 years earlier, on the same day, the fourth Falcon 1 rocket successfully reached orbit, saving SpaceX from near bankruptcy and beginning a legendary story.
Starship is enormous, standing 124 meters tall and weighing approximately 5,000 metric tons at takeoff. Its first stage is powered by 33 Raptor V3 engines arranged closely in three concentric rings. Approximately 25 minutes after liftoff, the upper-stage Ship 41 relit while following a suborbital trajectory and, after a 19-second burn, inserted into orbit. It entered low Earth orbit at an altitude of approximately 275 kilometers and began deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. During its previous 13 flight tests, Starship had reached space multiple times, but all of those missions were limited to suborbital profiles.
The mission experienced a dramatic turn. After the spacecraft separated from its first stage, a vacuum Raptor engine shut down prematurely. SpaceX briefly decided to defer orbital insertion, and some news outlets even reported that the orbit-insertion attempt had failed. After the engineering team reassessed the situation, the mission control center issued the command, “Go for orbit.” The spacecraft ultimately inserted into low Earth orbit and deployed all 26 satellites at a rate of approximately one per minute. Because of the engine anomaly, it completed two orbits around Earth and then conducted a controlled splashdown in the North Pacific Ocean ahead of schedule.
Each Starlink V3 satellite provides approximately 1 Tbps of downlink capacity and 160 Gbps of uplink capacity—improvements of approximately 10 times and 22 times, respectively, over V2 Mini. SpaceX expects that a fully loaded Starship will eventually be able to carry 60 V3 satellites, adding approximately 60 Tbps of downlink capacity per launch, 20 times the capacity of Falcon 9. SpaceX’s long-term goal is to expand the Starlink constellation to 100,000 V3 satellites, equivalent to 100 times its current scale.
This launch carried a payload of 52 metric tons, making it the third-largest launch in history by payload mass. The low-Earth-orbit payload capacity of a V3-configured Starship is in the 100-metric-ton class. SpaceX announced the Starmind orbital AI computing initiative, which includes AI1 orbital computing satellites with a wingspan of 75 meters and the ability to carry a maximum computing load of 250 kW per satellite, using solar energy to power AI chips directly. Musk said that, theoretically, launching one million metric tons of satellites into orbit each year could add approximately 100 GW of orbital AI computing power.
From the 27-metric-ton Falcon 1 to the 5,000-metric-ton Starship, SpaceX is transforming large-scale access to orbit from a singular feat into a routine transportation service. The entire International Space Station weighs only a little over 400 metric tons, meaning it would take just five Starship launches to construct an entirely new space station. An orbital transportation system that is sufficiently frequent and inexpensive will eventually greatly expand the limits of humanity’s future imagination.
