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Here's the Youtube version of the SpaceX documentary in the post above.

Saving three months of development time is a great benefit of landing it intact.

SpaceX has just pushed back Flight 14 another week: "Now targeting to launch Starship Flight 14 as early as Monday, September 28, pending regulatory approval."

Unknown why. Perhaps they are incorporating lessons learned from Ship 40.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2100633608734081213

Speaking of Ship 40, Forte recently passed Cape Town and is now in the South Atlantic.

(Sep 18, 2026 03:11 AM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]Speaking of Ship 40, Forte recently passed Cape Town and is now in the South Atlantic.

Booster B21, the Flight 14 booster, rolled out to the pad last night.

Spot the humans for scale

(Photo by Max Evans for Nasaspaceflight.com)

Ship 41 has rolled out to the pad to join its Booster

For an idea of the scale of this scene, check out the photo immediately preceding and note the size of the humans. There's a man down at the base of the ship in this photo.

(Photos by Starship Gazer)



On either side of the SpaceX X are two small black squares. These are Starlink comms antennas under protective covers. The closed cargo bay door is below. And below it is a black circle which is a sealed access port. The two kind of golden socket-like things are indeed sockets, docking gear for when ships mate in space to transfer fuel in orbit.

SpaceX says:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14

The 14th flight of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Monday, September 28, pending regulatory approval. The 75-minute launch window will open at 7:15 a.m. CT.

The upcoming flight is planned to be the first to send Starship into orbit around Earth. Flight tests until this point have intentionally flown passively safe suborbital trajectories to maximize public safety while allowing for maximum learning. By going to orbit, the next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin.

This will also mark the first time we plan to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into the constellation, delivering a payload that will dramatically expand connectivity speeds and reliability around the world.

Starship’s initial orbital mission is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km above Earth and complete approximately six orbits around the planet over the course of a nearly 10-hour flight, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Chile...

A live webcast of the flight will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. Coverage is planned to continue through splashdown, with the potential for hours of live views from Starship as it orbits Earth. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to check in here and stay tuned to our X account for updates.

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 of America. There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight.

After stage separation and flip on Flight 13, the Super Heavy booster was able to use all 33 engines on its boostback burn for the first time. In the terminal phase of the burn, the three center engines showed signs of ice clogging which triggered an early end to the maneuver. The booster went on to attempt a landing burn, with 8 of the 13 planned engines reigniting before the booster made a hard splashdown in the Gulf. The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability.

The Starship upper stage’s primary objectives include the first orbital insertion maneuver, the deployment of 26 Starlink V3 satellites, a deorbit burn using a single Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry, descent, and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission...

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, for a total of 26 Tbps of capacity added on this mission alone. That’s ~10x the capacity compared to a single launch of V2 mini Starlink satellites on Falcon 9...

Three of the satellites have been modified with a suite of cameras to scan Starship’s heatshield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heatshield readiness for return to launch site on future missions.

Several upgrades and experiments related to Starship’s heatshield will also be tested, with some improvements derived directly from data gathered from the Flight 13 Starship as it floated in the Indian Ocean. They include additional retention mechanisms added to tiles in areas deemed to be at highest risk of falling off during ascent, addressing recently discovered areas that offer flow paths behind tiles for plasma, and flying multiple areas with a curved tile design that has shown the ability to reduce heating in the gaps between tiles. And finally, two tiles recovered from Ship 40 are planned to be reflown on Ship 41, marking the first tile reuse for Starship.

They just conducted a successful launch rehearsal, in which they load propellant into the vehicle and run the countdown until just a few seconds before t-0, before detanking.

(SpaceX photo)

The FAA just issued the Flight 14 launch license:

https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternal...pened=true