SpaceX Starship Flight Fourteen: The Orbit Test and the Mars Problem

Thirty-three engines light at once. Close to twenty million pounds of thrust. The most powerful rocket ever built clears the pad at Starbase, Texas... and about eight minutes later it does something this program had never done in thirteen previous flights.

Which is?

It reached orbit. Actual orbit. Monday, September twenty-eighth.

Hang on. This thing's been flying since twenty twenty-three. It had never been to ORBIT?

Never. Every flight before that was deliberately short. Engineers call it a transatmospheric trajectory. You go almost the whole way around, but you aim just under orbital speed, so if the engines die, physics drops you in the ocean instead of leaving a two-hundred-ton stainless steel building circling the planet.

Okay, fair. That's a reasonable fear.

On flight fourteen they finally committed. CNN's live coverage was blunt about both halves of it. Starship reached orbit, deployed all twenty-six Starlink satellites it was carrying... and then one of the Raptor vacuum engines shut down early, and SpaceX cut the mission short.

A win and a warning in the same flight.

Same hour. The ship still came back through reentry intact, did a controlled landing burn, splashed down in the Pacific. Spaceflight Now reported that depending on how that went, SpaceX may try to CATCH the upper stage with the tower on flight fifteen.

Catch it. With the arms. Like they catch the booster.

That's the plan. And none of it is the hard part of going to Mars. Reaching orbit is barely the warm-up.

Then what's the hard part?

Refuelling. In space. Starship gets to low Earth orbit essentially empty. To push on to Mars it has to be topped back up by other Starships flying up as tankers. For the Moon version alone, NASA's architecture needs something like ten tanker launches to fill a propellant depot before the lander goes anywhere.

Ten launches to fuel one ship.

Ten. And nobody has ever done it. Spacecraft have moved conventional propellants in orbit since nineteen seventy-eight, but nobody has docked two giant vehicles and pumped hundreds of tonnes of supercold methane and oxygen between them.

Supercold meaning it's trying to boil off the entire time.

Constantly. Liquid oxygen at minus one hundred and eighty-three Celsius, sloshing in zero gravity with no down for it to settle into. SpaceX did move about ten tonnes of liquid oxygen between two tanks inside a single Starship on flight three, March twenty twenty-four. That is the only data point they have.

And ship to ship? When's that?

Originally penciled in for March twenty twenty-five. Slipped to March twenty twenty-six. As of September this year... it isn't even on the schedule.

So the single most important technology for Mars is the one thing they haven't tried.

And it's already cost them. NASA's acting administrator, Sean Duffy, announced the agency is reopening the Artemis three lunar lander contract to competition, because of Starship delays. SpaceX had that job. Now it has rivals for it. Blue Origin among them.

They can just take it back?

They can open it up. And look at the pattern NASA is reacting to. Twenty sixteen: SpaceX says uncrewed Mars landing as soon as twenty eighteen. Twenty seventeen: cargo landings in twenty twenty-two. Twenty twenty-four: Musk says the first Starships leave in the twenty twenty-six transfer window.

Which is this year. Which is now.

Right now. Last May he put it at fifty-fifty. Today SpaceX's own Mars page says cargo flights to the Martian surface no earlier than twenty twenty-eight. Ten years, four deadlines, no landing.

So we just mentally add four years to anything he says.

Plenty of people in the industry do exactly that. But here's what I keep coming back to. The deadlines slip and the hardware keeps getting better. March twenty twenty-five, a fuel leak destroyed a ship in flight. They redesigned the Raptor with welded fuel joints, flew it in May twenty twenty-six, and by September they were in orbit deploying satellites.

So the dates are fiction. The progress is real.

That's the most honest summary of SpaceX I can give you. And that combination still frightens everyone else. Nobody on Earth has a bigger rocket. Nobody else flies one every few weeks and throws it away just to learn something.

Okay. So who's actually ahead?

SpaceX, by a distance nobody's close to. But ahead isn't arriving. Mars windows open roughly every twenty-six months, so the next real shot is twenty twenty-eight... and to make it, they have to prove orbital refuelling first.

One demo. That's the whole gate.

One demo. Two ships, docked, pumping fuel in the dark. Watch for that flight. The day it works, Mars stops being a slide in a presentation... and turns into a launch date.