Nick

Space enthusiast

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

As the prophecy foretold, Starship 42 will be the first tower catch

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Ship 42 static fires complete. The Starship preparing for Flight 15 performed a full duration, six-engine static fire, and fired a single Raptor engine to simulate a deorbit burn

[Starship Gazer @StarshipGazer]

Starship 42 performing a full duration 6 engine static fire test ahead of upcoming Starship flight 15.

10/27/26

[RGV Aerial Photography @RGVaerialphotos]

Booster 22 has been lifted to catch height!

[NSF - NASASpaceflight.com @NASASpaceflight]

Starship Flight 15: Booster 22 Static Fire!

https://t.co/yz2tFMJByh

[Marcus House @MarcusHouse]

Wow! 🤯 The fact it has been confirmed again that this is the plan in Flight 15 along with a catch of the Super Heavy absolutely blows my mind. This new animation is inspiration+.

Excitement Guaranteed!

[Starship Gazer @StarshipGazer]

Up close with Starship 40 rolling by while returning to Starbase after an incredible journey around the world.

10/10/26

[Avid Space @LabPadre]

After a day in space and a month at sea Ship 40 is back in Texas!

[Starship Gazer @StarshipGazer]

Starship 40 arriving at the Port of Brownsville today after completing an epic journey.

10/7/26

[Marcus House @MarcusHouse]

Ship 40 should arrive in port in the morning!
What an incredible story this has been. 🥳

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Hot-staging on Starship Flight 14

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Starship's first orbital flight delivered 26 Starlink V3 satellites to space

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Three Falcons ready to fly simultaneously

[Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut]

I find it funny that some people got hung up on Starship not having gone orbital before Flight 14 when in the grand scheme of things it was completely arbitrary in terms of performance. The 19ish second burn only added about 91 m/s of velocity (a 1.2% increase in velocity)

This capability has been physically capable since Flight 6 which demonstrated a single Raptor relight in space. Heck, Flight 13’s burn was about 14 seconds, but intentionally oriented to primarily do a plane change instead of a prograde insertion burn for continued safety.

Any of the relights COULD have done the orbital insertion burn, the duration was not of any special technical capability. The reason Starship didn’t go orbital until Flight 14 is probably what we should applaud them for the most… SAFETY.

Their methodical approach to getting good data and going one step at a time while hucking the single most massive object ever put into space proves they weren’t just doing things haphazardly, despite the occasional narrative from the outside.

While it’s easy to compare Starship to vehicles like SLS or Vulcan or New Glenn, the reality is the focus hasn’t been on orbit, it’s been all on the “downhill” side of that. Safe and targeted de-orbit, clean reentry, targeted and soft splashdown. That’s the part that has (almost) never been done before.

And here I do have to add a little Space Shuttle admiration for figuring out a lot of these things on its first flight in 1981 (although it came a bit close to not being successful). Pretty amazing there was a vehicle of similar scale capable of such precise deorbit and reentry that it landed on a runway with no go-around capabilities. Crazy.

But Starship is well on a path to absolutely leap-frog the Space Shuttle in terms of performance (already over double and someday 6 fold) and hopefully in terms of full and rapid reuse. I hope we see the latter part speed up even more now that orbit has been demonstrated.

Exciting times ahead!!! Keep going @spacex @elonmusk

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Sunrise at pad 40

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Starship Flight 14

[Shana Diez @ShanaDiez]

Today was the day! I’ve been living full time in South Texas for almost 6 years on what I originally thought was going to be an 18 month rotation working towards what we got today, a Starship that delivers payload to orbit. I’ve worked on a reasonable number of rocket programs and there is something special about getting to orbit (and breaking free of the tyranny of Earth’s gravity).

I don’t feel like there’s any one team to recognize for this because many people worked for months and years to get to an operational Starship today. We have lots more excitement on the way with ship and booster catch to get right, but this feels like a big step and I’m excited that it went so well today.

It’s icing on the cake that this is 18 years to the day of making orbit on Falcon 1. I’ve been thinking back to that day this evening. It’s a different feeling than that because we had the whole company riding on one launch back then, but Starship feels like the beginning of a new chapter in what it can unlock that brings a similar amount of hope and excitement for the future.

Ad Astra! Thank you to all the SpaceXers and happy Orbit Day!

[Atelier Missor @AtelierMissor_]

Prometheus was raised tonight.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Deorbit burn complete. Starship is on course to reenter Earth’s atmosphere ahead of a planned splashdown in the Pacific Ocean in ~1 hour

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

All 26 Starlink V3 operational satellites deployed and operating nominally