Overview
- Starship completed its first orbital insertion on Sept. 28 and successfully deployed 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites that SpaceX says are contacting ground stations.
- During ascent one of the upper-stage Raptor engines shut down prematurely, prompting controllers to cut a planned roughly 10-hour mission to about three hours and order a deorbit.
- The Starship upper stage reentered and splashed down in the northern Pacific, breaking apart on impact as SpaceX recovered telemetry, camera footage and hardware for analysis.
- The Raptor 3 design has shown problems on recent Starship flights, and SpaceX is investigating whether the latest shutdown is an isolated fault or a fleet-wide issue while the FAA declined a formal mishap probe.
- SpaceX is planning near-term follow-up flights and an attempted tower 'catch' on a future mission with provisional dates from ATCSCC, but any schedule for rapid reuse or NASA's Artemis HLS work will depend on fixes confirmed by telemetry and hardware reviews.