Space · Thursday, 17 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

SpaceX will try to send Starship to orbit for the first time on 22 September, carrying 26 of its own satellites

SpaceX set 22 September for the fourteenth test flight of Starship, its giant new rocket, and the first meant to reach orbit. The cargo is 26 of the company's own Starlink internet satellites, so if the rocket fails, no outside customer loses anything.

of SpaceX's own Starlink satellites riding the first Starship flight aimed at orbit

each adds 1 terabit a second, about 3% more capacity across the whole network [3]

14th

Starship test flight, and the first meant to complete a full orbit

the first flew on 20 April 2023, and the thirteenth on 24 July this year [2]

8% of $12.5bn

of SpaceX's revenue in the first half of 2026 that came from launching rockets

Starlink and AI work brought in most of the rest [5]

6 orbits

the ship is meant to fly before coming down west of Chile

about ten hours in space, against 65 minutes on the earlier hops [1]

The lead story — what happened

SpaceX said on Tuesday 15 September that it will try to launch Starship to orbit on 22 September, from its Starbase site in south Texas. [1][2]
Starship is the giant rocket SpaceX is building to replace its workhorse Falcon 9. Its first thirteen test flights all went up and came down without completing a circle of the Earth. [1][2]
The launch window opens at 12:15 GMT and lasts 75 minutes. [1]
The upper stage, called Ship, is meant to circle the Earth six times at about 275 km up, then splash down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile about ten hours after liftoff. [1][2]
It will carry 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Starlink is SpaceX's own network of more than 11,000 internet satellites, and the V3 version is too big to fly on a Falcon 9. [1]
Each V3 satellite carries 1 terabit of data a second, so this one flight would add about 3% to the whole network's capacity, The Verge reports. [3]
SpaceX's finance chief Bret Johnsen told investors on 10 September that this will be a revenue-generating flight. Aviation Week points out that the money comes from SpaceX's own pockets, because the satellites are SpaceX's. [4]
On the last test flight, on 24 July, ice clogged three engines at the centre of the booster as it came back, and it hit the water hard. [2]
This booster has better filters and new software for relighting its engines, and will aim for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico rather than a return to the launch tower. [2]
SpaceX has added extra fastenings to the ship's heat-shield tiles, the ceramic tiles that stop it burning up on the way down, and is reflying two tiles recovered from July's ship for the first time. [2]
Three of the 26 satellites carry cameras and will photograph the heat shield after they are released. [1]
Launching rockets is a small part of SpaceX's money. Ars Technica read the company's published accounts and found 8% of its 12.5 billion dollars of revenue in the first half of 2026 came from launches, with Starlink and AI work bringing in most of the rest. [5]

Who is involved

SpaceX

the US rocket company that flies most of the world's launches; it built Starship and owns the satellites it will carry
Bret Johnsen

SpaceX's chief financial officer; he told investors on 10 September that the test flight will earn revenue
Elon Musk

SpaceX's chief executive; he said earlier that this flight would not try to catch either stage with the launch tower
NASA

the US space agency; it buys crew and cargo flights from SpaceX and moved Crew-13 to early October

How it unfolded

20 Apr 2023 the first Starship test flight [2]
24 Jul 2026 the thirteenth flight; ice clogs three booster engines on the way down [2]
Late Aug SpaceX fires all 33 engines of this booster on the pad [4]
10 Sep SpaceX's finance chief calls the coming flight revenue-generating [4]
15 Sep SpaceX sets 22 September and publishes the flight plan [1][2]
22 Sep the 75-minute launch window opens at 12:15 GMT [1]

Where this points

Watch whether Starship lifts off in its 22 September window and lets all 26 satellites go, and whether those satellites then raise their own orbits under their own power. [2]

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Flying the same hardware again Building↑

Two heat-shield tiles recovered from July's Starship will fly again on 22 September. [2] Five SpaceX engineers who taught the Falcon 9 to land received the first Neil Armstrong Space Prize on 15 September. [6] The Falcon 9 booster due to carry a secret Space Force satellite this week was flying for the thirteenth time. [14]

Launches waiting on checks High→

NASA moved its next crew flight, Crew-13, to early October after engineers replaced a leaking valve in the Dragon capsule. [7] SpaceX called off the Space Force launch on 15 September before fuelling and gave no public reason. [14] Starship's 22 September date still depends on approval from regulators. [2][3]

Keeping the space station supplied Steady→

A Russian Progress 96 cargo ship launched on Wednesday with about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies. [8] Seven people are living on the station and waiting for the next crew. [7] NASA's rebuilt ground station on Guam has closed the gap where the station used to lose contact for up to 20 minutes an orbit. [13]

One result is not enough Steady↑

The dark-matter experiment in South Dakota has three times as much data still to search after one unexplained particle. [12] Polar scientists say the slowdown in ice loss from 2020 to 2023 is a short-term swing, not a reversal. [9] A new simulation shows one way the early universe could build giant black holes, and astronomers still argue about what Webb's little red dots are. [10]

The rest of the day

8 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Crew-13 moves to early October

NASA said on 16 September that it and SpaceX are now aiming for early October to launch Crew-13, the next crew flight to the International Space Station. [7] The flight was held up when a leak turned up in the propulsion system of its Dragon capsule during preparations. [7] Engineers have since replaced the valve that controls the oxidiser, the chemical the engines burn the fuel with. [7] The remaining time is for prelaunch work, readiness reviews and fitting the launch into the station's schedule. [7]

Why it matters — The four people who arrived on the last SpaceX crew flight have been aboard since 14 February, and they spoke to reporters from orbit on the day the new date was announced. [7] Commander Jessica Meir has already cleared storage space for the crew that is meant to relieve them. [7]
03
A Russian cargo ship is on its way up

The uncrewed Progress 96 freighter launched on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 9:33 in the morning, US eastern time, on Wednesday 16 September. [8] Progress ships are Russia's routine supply run to the International Space Station, flown by its space agency Roscosmos. [8] This one is carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies for the seven people aboard. [8][7] It is due to dock by itself to the station's Poisk module at 9:46 on Saturday morning. [8]

Why it matters — Nothing on the station is made there, so food and fuel arrive by ship. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus freighter has been parked at the Unity module since 14 April and the crew is still unloading it. [7]
04
Fifty years of ice loss, counted

Polar scientists published the longest consistent record yet of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica, in the journal Scientific Data this month. [9] The team, called IMBIE, combined 42 surveys drawn from 27 satellite missions, reaching back to 1972 for Greenland and 1979 for Antarctica. [9] Between 1979 and 2023 the two ice sheets lost 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice, and pushed global sea level up by 3.14 centimetres. [9] About 84% of that came from glaciers flowing faster into the sea, not from melting at the surface. [9]

Why it matters — Andrew Shepherd of Northumbria University in the UK, who founded the project, says just over three centimetres of sea-level rise puts another six to nine million people at risk of coastal flooding and erosion. [9] Ice loss slowed between 2020 and 2023, after heavy snowfall in East Antarctica and mild summers in Greenland, and the team says that is a short-term swing rather than a change of direction. [9]
05
A simulation grows giant black holes fast

A study published in Nature on Wednesday shows how the early universe could have built very heavy black holes within a few hundred million years. [10][11] Sunmyon Chon of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany ran the simulation. [10] In it, strong light from young galaxies nearby stops stars forming in a dense cloud of gas, so the gas collapses straight into a heavy black-hole seed. [10][11] The team says such a seed would look, from outside, like the little red dots the James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding. [10]

Why it matters — Little red dots are tiny red objects from about a billion years after the Big Bang, each roughly one pixel wide in Webb's pictures, and astronomers have argued about them since 2023. [10] A simulation shows that one route is possible. It does not show that the universe took it, and Webb's measurements are the test. [10]
06
One odd particle, and a name for it

The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment sits 1,500 metres underground in a former gold mine in South Dakota. [12] It watches seven tonnes of liquid xenon for the moment a dark-matter particle knocks into an atom. [12] On 16 June its detectors recorded one such knock, at an energy of 248 kiloelectron volts, that the team could not explain with any known background. [12] New papers, including one from the experiment itself, now suggest a heavy particle called a Higgsino, about 200 times the mass of a proton. [12]

Why it matters — Dark matter is the name for the 85% of the universe's mass that gives off no light and has never been caught directly. [12] The team has three times as much data still to sift, and says it should hold one to three more events like this if the signal is real. [12]
07
NASA's Guam antenna is fully rebuilt

NASA held a ribbon-cutting on 10 September for the Guam Remote Station, its ground station on the Pacific island, three years after a typhoon wrecked it. [13] Super Typhoon Mawar hit on 24 May 2023 with winds of 185 miles an hour, destroying two 16.5-metre dishes. [13] The US Congress set aside disaster-relief money in early 2025 to rebuild and strengthen the site, and the central dish went back into service on 1 July. [13] The station has since ridden out two stronger super typhoons with little damage. [13]

Why it matters — Guam is one of three stations that link NASA's relay satellites, 22,000 miles up, to the ground. [13] Without it, the International Space Station loses contact with Earth for up to 20 minutes of every 90-minute orbit. [13]
08
A secret Space Force launch was called off

SpaceX stopped the launch of USSF-259, a classified mission for the US Space Force, on the evening of 15 September. [14] The countdown was halted before the Falcon 9 was fuelled, with no public explanation. [14] SpaceX reset the attempt for the next evening from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. [14] It is the third flight in a month bought from SpaceX under the same Space Force contract, and public documents say the earlier two each carried 23 satellites. [14]

Why it matters — The Space Force will not confirm anything about what these satellites do, and the live broadcast stops shortly after the booster lands. [14][15] A fourth mission under the same contract is scheduled for 27 September. [14]
09
Falcon 9's landing team wins a new prize

Five SpaceX engineers received the first Neil Armstrong Space Prize at a ceremony in Washington on Tuesday 15 September. [6] They stand for the much larger team that taught the Falcon 9 rocket to land. [6] Purdue University, where Armstrong studied, created the yearly award and wants it to become a Nobel for space. [6] The Falcon 9's first stage first landed upright on 21 December 2015, on the rocket's twentieth flight, after putting 11 Orbcomm satellites in orbit. [6]

Why it matters — Boosters have now landed more than 650 times, and one has flown 37 times. [6] Reuse is why Falcon 9 flies so much: 165 missions in 2025, about half of all the orbital launches in the world. [6]

02 Lesson why it matters

A new rocket's riskiest flights carry cargo its builder can afford to lose

A satellite lost in a failed test takes years to replace, so the first flights of an unproven rocket tend to carry the builder's own hardware.

The twist

SpaceX can put a brand-new rocket to work early because it is buying from itself. If Starship fails on 22 September, the satellites lost are SpaceX's own, and no other company loses years of work.

How it works

A rocket that has never reached orbit can fail and destroy what it is carrying
A customer's satellite takes years and a lot of money to replace
So almost nobody books a satellite on a rocket with no flights behind it
The builder fills the early flights with cargo it can afford to lose: its own, or nothing useful
Or it waits until the customer's satellite is safely away, then tries the risky part
Each flight that works becomes a record the next customer can look at

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

Falcon 9's landing team wins a new prize

the first upright landing, in December 2015, was tried only after the rocket had already delivered eleven Orbcomm satellites, so the risky part came when the customer's cargo was gone
Crew-13 moves to early October

the same rule at the other end - people are cargo nobody can afford to lose, so NASA holds the flight on the ground until a leaking valve is replaced and every review is finished

Where you've seen this

New airliners

the maker's own test pilots fly for months with no passengers aboard

Software

a company makes its own staff use the new version weeks before customers get it

Car makers

new models run up thousands of miles in the firm's own test fleet before one is sold

The catch

It only works for a builder that has cargo of its own worth flying. A rocket company without a satellite network has to find a customer willing to take the risk, or fly with concrete blocks and earn nothing.

And the whole of it

The risk of a first flight does not disappear. It sits with whoever owns what is on top, and on 22 September that is SpaceX. The engineers will see every reading from the rocket that day. A company deciding later whether to book a satellite on Starship will see one thing: whether the flight worked.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

SpaceX is the customer for its own test flight. The 26 satellites riding Starship on 22 September belong to SpaceX, and its finance chief has already described the flight as earning money. [1][4] If the rocket fails, the hardware lost is the company's own, and no outside customer is waiting on a replacement.

Why it works on us — A published date, a launch window and a mission plan make a test flight read like a scheduled service, but Ars Technica and The Verge both wrote on 15 September that the date still depends on approval from regulators. [2][3]

Who gains

SpaceX's Starlink business — A test flight doubles as a delivery: 26 bigger satellites, about 3% more capacity across the network, on a rocket that is still being proved. [1][3]
Rocket builders copying reusable boosters — Two Chinese rockets have landed first stages in the past few months, using a method SpaceX spent three or four years working out and demonstrated in public. [6]
The crew and controllers of the International Space Station — The rebuilt Guam dish closes the stretch of each orbit where the station used to lose contact for up to 20 minutes. [13]
Rival dark-matter experiments — XENONnT in Italy and PandaX in China can now search the same higher energies that produced the South Dakota event. [12]
Coastal planners — The IMBIE record reconciles 42 surveys from 27 satellite missions into one half-century series they can use for sea-level projections. [9]

Who pays

SpaceX, if Flight 14 fails — It loses 26 of its own satellites and the revenue its finance chief attached to the flight. [1][4]
The four crew members aboard the space station since 14 February — Their relief flight, Crew-13, has moved to early October while a leaking valve is replaced and the reviews are redone. [7]
People on low-lying coasts — The 3.14 centimetres of sea-level rise measured since 1979 puts another six to nine million people in reach of flooding and erosion, the project's founder says. [9]
Anyone outside the US government trying to see what its military launches carry — Three Space Force missions in a month were flown with no payload description, and the webcast ends soon after the booster lands. [14][15]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether the 22 September flight has its licence yet.

SpaceX announced the date, and both Ars Technica and The Verge described the plan as pending regulatory approval. [2][3]
02

What SpaceX counts as revenue on a flight carrying its own satellites.

Bret Johnsen called it a revenue-generating flight and Aviation Week notes the money comes from SpaceX's own pockets. No figure has been published. [4]
03

What happens to the 26 satellites if the ship fails before it releases them.

Neither SpaceX's published mission description nor the reports of it say. [1][2]
04

Whether the secret USSF-259 mission flew on 16 September, and what it carries.

Spaceflight Now reported the reset window before it opened, and the US Space Force has declined to confirm any detail of these missions. [14]
05

Whether the particle seen in South Dakota on 16 June is dark matter.

It is one event, its statistical strength is too low to call a detection, and the team says one to three more should appear in the data it is still searching. [12]
06

Whether the early universe built its giant black holes the way the new simulation does.

The Nature study shows a route that works in a computer; the little red dots Webb sees are still argued over by astronomers. [10][11]
07

Whether the slowdown in polar ice loss from 2020 to 2023 lasts.

The IMBIE team attributes it to heavy snowfall in East Antarctica and mild Greenland summers, and calls it a short-term variation rather than a reversal. [9]
08

How much the Guam rebuild cost, and how much went to the other three ground stations.

NASA says the US Congress set aside disaster-relief money in early 2025 for Guam and three other ground stations, and gives no amount. [13]

04 Hope carry this

NASA's ground station on Guam is fully working again, three years after a typhoon with 185 mile-an-hour winds destroyed two of its dishes. The rebuilt site has since come through two stronger typhoons with little damage.

Also true today

Falcon 9 boosters have now landed more than 650 times, and one of them has flown 37 separate missions. One of the engineers who worked out how says it took three or four years to turn a calculation that looked easy on paper into a rocket that lands.