Starship launches Starlink Group 31-1 (Starship Flight 14) from SpaceX Starbase

The flight

The window opened at 12:15 UTC and ran 75 minutes. Liftoff came 34 minutes into it.

The first stage, Booster 21, was making its 1st flight.

It landed on Gulf of Mexico.

The payload was bound for Low Earth Orbit.

The mission

14th test flight of the two-stage Starship launch vehicle. 3rd flight of Starship V3 and the first Starship flight to deploy satellites (a group of Starlink satellites known as Starlink Group 31-1) into stable Low Earth Orbit. The ship is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km above Earth and complete approximately 6 orbits around the planet for nearly 10 hours, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. The booster’s primary test objective on Flight 14 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf. Starship will deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites to orbit for the first time, which aim to greatly expand the network's capacity and user speeds. Each Starlink V3 satellite will add 1 Tbps of capacity to the constellation.

Payload description as recorded by Launch Library 2.

By the numbers

SpaceX has now flown 735 launches in total. Its run of consecutive successful launches stands at 220.

It was the 3rd launch from Orbital Launch Pad 2.