Starship just cleared a major hurdle ahead of its first orbital flight. SpaceX announced this afternoon (September 24) that it has completed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the next flight of Starship, the massive, fully reusable rocket it is developing to help humanity settle on the Moon and Mars. During a WDR, mission teams fuel a vehicle and go through all the major steps they will take on launch day, without starting the engines. With this key test in the books, Starship remains on track to launch Monday morning (Sept. 28) on its 14th test flight, which will take the 407-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) vehicle farther than ever before. Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4September 24, 2026Starship debuted in April 2023. That launch, and the 12 that followed, sent Starship’s upper stage spacecraft, known as Ship, on a suborbital trajectory. However, on flight 14, the 171-foot-tall (52-m-tall) craft will go fast enough to enter orbit. Once there, it will deploy 26 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Version 3 satellites, the first members of a constellation that Elon Musk says will eventually be made up of 100,000 spacecraft. You might like Ship to stay awake for a while, if all goes according to plan; It will circle the Earth six times before landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. (That splashdown area is also new; previous Starship flights targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.) Starship’s first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, will make its own splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. This will occur about seven minutes after launch. However, that will not be the end of Starship’s operational flights. SpaceX wants to trap both Ship and Super Heavy on the pad, using the launch tower’s “stick” arms. The company has already done this with Super Heavy on three previous flights, but has not yet attempted to do so with Ship. A view of the WDR from above. (Image credit: SpaceX) Starship Flight 14 is scheduled to launch from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch all the action live here on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX. And there should be plenty to watch: The company has said its goal is to maintain power throughout the craft’s six orbits around Earth and its landing.
