SpaceX's giant Starship lifted off from its company town and launch site in Starbase, Texas, early Monday, with employees on hand celebrating a milestone years in the making. A live broadcast on X, a social network the company owns, showed liftoff occurring at 8:48 a.m. ET and 7:48 a.m. local time. Starship ascended to orbit at about 8:15 a.m. local time during its 14th test flight, the first of the program aimed to circle the planet.
Moments after launch, the Super Heavy booster returned to the water with what SpaceX described as a "soft splashdown" near the Texas coast. The Starship upper stage kept climbing, though one of its vacuum engines shut down while it was on a sub‑orbital path.
This test added a big first: SpaceX successfully released a batch of 26 Starlink V3 satellites built for the latest iteration of the network. The company had hoped Starship would make several laps around Earth and then touch down off Chile. Instead, SpaceX brought the spacecraft down earlier, with a splashdown at about 10:58 a.m. local time.
SpaceX designed Starship and its Super Heavy booster for complete reusability and to carry heavier loads to orbit at a lower price than legacy launchers. Monday marked progress, but the company has yet to show that the Starship Super Heavy stack can be reused reliably across flights.
Starship sits at the center of SpaceX's growth plans. The rocket underpins the expansion of Starlink, the company's Connectivity segment, which was its biggest business and the only profitable one as of the second quarter. SpaceX currently operates around 11,000 active satellites, far more than competitor Eutelsat OneWeb's roughly 650.
On an August earnings call, Elon Musk said, "It's not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's internet, at least in countries where we're allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries." One fully loaded Starship can carry 60 Starlink V3 satellites, a payload the company says is about twenty times what a Falcon 9 can deliver for that generation.
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The latest V3 satellites are built at SpaceX's facility in Redmond, Washington. They are larger, feature solar arrays that generate twice the power of earlier versions, and are designed to be more capable, moving data faster to Starlink users.
In June, SpaceX entered public markets via what became the largest IPO ever recorded, putting its market value at about $2 trillion. Looking ahead, the company is gearing up for a significant NASA test mission next year and plans to use Starship to return U.S. astronauts to the moon's surface. Musk had previously set targets of reaching orbit in 2022 and beginning satellite deployments in 2023, and in November 2024 he announced a goal for Starship to fly at least once on a biweekly cadence by the end of 2025.
SpaceX also has ambitions beyond broadband. At the All‑In Summit earlier this month, COO Gwynne Shotwell said the company intends to put "supercompute in space," launching "AI compute satellites" in 2027.
For everyday investors, the through line is execution. Starship's first orbital outing and V3 deployment are meaningful, but the early splashdown and engine issue underscore that reliable reuse is still to be proved. Watch the flight cadence, the pace of V3 rollouts from Redmond, and whether Starlink's capacity gains translate into revenue growth. That is what ultimately shapes the value behind all the headlines.
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