SpaceX flew Starship to orbit for the first time on September 28, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites despite one of the upper stage's six engines going out at liftoff. The flight moves the vehicle closer to the operational heavy-lift launcher NASA and SpaceX are counting on.
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SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on September 28 and deployed 26 working Starlink V3 satellites, each built to add 1 Tbps of capacity. Buyers can count on that capacity this quarter, while teams hoping to book Starship for their own payloads have one partial orbital flight to judge it by.
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SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 will try to reach orbit for the first time carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites that together add about 26 Tbps of capacity. For a company valued near $2 trillion, it tests how much one launch can lift, while the cost of each launch still depends on reuse.
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SpaceX put Starship into orbit on its first orbital flight even after one of the upper stage's six Raptor engines shut down early. It sets up the orbital refuelling tests NASA's 2028 moon landing depends on, though those tests and an upper-stage catch are still ahead.
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LandSpace has brought a Zhuque-3 booster back to Earth, a first for China, but no Chinese booster has flown twice, and SpaceX has done it hundreds of times. Launch savings come from reflying hardware, and China's 2030 'space power' plan depends on exactly that.
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Flight 14 opens its window on 22 September carrying real payload for the first time, though neither stage will attempt a landing and Starship is flying at roughly four a year against the 25 test flights SpaceX officials once hoped for.
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SpaceX will let flight controllers decide during the coast phase whether Starship circularizes on Flight 14, a check that stands between the company and both V3 satellite deployment at scale and in-space refueling tests.
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Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital led a $1 billion Series E at roughly $10 billion. The money funds two clean-sheet rockets in parallel: Pathfinder in 2027 and the 14-engine Block 2 in 2029.
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Crunchbase counted four U.S. rounds of $1bn or more in one week. Tunneling, truck fleets and reusable rockets took $5.3bn of the $7.3bn, and the United Arab Emirates led the biggest check of the four.
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Recovery is not reflight, and no recovered Chinese stage has flown twice yet. What changed in under two months is how many independent programs could get there.
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Eight months after a failed engine reignition destroyed its first attempt, LandSpace landed Zhuque-3's stainless-steel first stage in Gansu. The fix cycle is the story, not the milestone.
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