Starship Flight 14
First orbital flight · 26 Starlink V3 · Starbase Pad 2
Liftoff time (T-0)
The launch can slip inside its 75 minute window or to another day. Line the simulation up with the webcast here.
Your setting is kept in the page address, so a shared link carries it.
Flight 14: the first Starship in orbit
Booster 21 and Ship 41, the third flight of the larger V3 vehicles, lift off from Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas. The window opens at 7:15 a.m. CDT (12:15 UTC) on Monday 28 September 2026 and lasts 75 minutes. Backup days run to 4 October.
Every Starship so far has flown a suborbital path that falls back by itself. This one will light its engines again about 25 minutes after launch to stay up: roughly 275 km high at 32°, about six orbits in a flight of almost ten hours, carrying the first 26 Starlink V3 satellites (group 31-1).
What full success looks like
SpaceX will only burn into orbit once the flight team has confirmed enough redundancy for the deorbit burn at the end. That rule is what the no-go case below plays out.
Two ways it could go differently
Pick a case at any moment, also during the live flight. Everything before the point where the cases part stays the same; after it, the simulation jumps to the other branch.
How this simulation works
The clock follows the scheduled liftoff time (or the one you set) and runs in real time. The ascent to engine cutoff follows keyframes fitted to the published timelines of the V3 flights: Max Q at 45 s, booster cutoff and hot staging from about T+2:22, boostback from T+2:30 to T+3:30. Everything after that is computed: gravity, drag, entry lift, the boostback, orbital insertion, the deorbit burn and both landing burns are integrated second by second. The deorbit time is solved so the ship splashes down at the planned T+9:50:30, and the model then brings it down west of Chile, as planned. Skipping the insertion burn lets the same model fall back into the Indian Ocean. The Sun and the dawn light are computed for the exact date and time.
Not modelled: weather, the exact guidance, engine by engine throttle, exact landing coordinates and anything SpaceX has not published. Speeds and altitudes are approximate, typically within a few percent of recent flights. Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble.
Sources
Building Starbase