SpaceX will attempt to send Starship to orbit for the first time today, in a flight that is still called a test but is meant to end with 26 working satellites in space.
What changes today
Starship has flown from south Texas 13 times since 2023, with nearly half of those attempts ending in some form of unintended explosion. Every one of them was deliberately flown on what SpaceX calls a "passively safe suborbital trajectory" — meaning that even if control was completely lost, the vehicle was already on a path to re-enter and come down in a chosen spot.
Reaching orbit removes that. At orbital speed and on a precise trajectory, Starship enters free fall around the planet, and if it loses control it cannot simply be dragged back down. SpaceX plans to fly at about 171 miles (275km) — below the International Space Station at roughly 200 miles and China's Tiangong above that — but an uncontrolled vehicle up there could collide with working satellites. The company says it may abort the orbital burn and stay suborbital if anything looks wrong in the opening minutes.
Joseph Gonzalez, who teaches aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois, put the risk plainly: there are many ways a propellant system can fail, and the result is "a dead object that's in orbit that can pose a risk".
A ten-hour flight
Most Starship tests have lasted a little over an hour. Today's is planned to run close to ten hours: deploy 26 upgraded Starlink satellites, complete six laps of the planet, then re-enter and attempt an upright, controlled landing in the Pacific off the coast of Chile. Before the orbital burn, the ship will spend about 20 minutes checking that the systems for guiding it home — and their backups — are working.
The Super Heavy booster will again practise a landing over the ocean rather than returning to the tower. On July's flight only eight of its 13 engines relit before the landing attempt; SpaceX says it has made hardware changes to improve engine filtering and software changes to make relights more reliable.
Musk hinted the company might try to catch the ship back at the tower today, then decided against it. His stated reason was blunt: the concern is the ship breaking up over land and raining debris on people, and "our popularity would diminish very rapidly". In 2025, two consecutive test flights scattered debris over and near populated areas in Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas.
What rides on it
Starship is meant to carry upgraded Starlink satellites, orbital data centres Musk wants to use for AI workloads, and — under a multibillion-dollar contract — NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, in a new race with China. If today works, the vehicle moves from testing towards operation, and the launch industry's economics move with it.
What it means in Bangladesh
The connection here is more direct than it looks. The satellites on this flight are the next generation of the same constellation that Banglalink is about to use for direct-to-cell service. Capacity in orbit is what decides whether satellite messaging to an ordinary handset stays a thin emergency channel or becomes something a fishing crew can rely on daily — and Starship is how that capacity gets up there cheaply. A country buying into satellite connectivity has a stake in this rocket working, whatever it thinks of the man who owns it.
