Wow! Watch SpaceX’s Starship megarocket deploy satellites into orbit for the first time (photos, video)
Construction of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellite megaconstellation is officially underway.
The event occurred today (September 28), during the 14th test flight of the company Spacecraft megarocket. The 407-foot-tall (124-meter) spacecraft first reached orbit on Flight 14 — and it did something productive while it was up there.
The Starship’s upper stage, known as Ship, successfully delivered 26 of the EspaceXStarlink version 3 (V3) Star link satellites to low earth orbit (LEO) today. And we got great views of the deployment, thanks to cameras on board the ship and on satellites.
EspaceX currently working more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO – by far the largest array of spacecraft ever assembled. But the Starlink V3 megaconstellation will be a completely different animal.
For starters, the Starlink V3 satellites are about twice as heavy as their predecessors, tipping the scales here on Earth at around 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms). They can only fly effectively on the ultra-powerful ship; they are too big to launch aboard SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which built the original Starlink constellation.
The new Starlinks are also much more efficient.
“The Starlink V3 satellite is designed to support 1 Tbps (terabytes per second) of downlink capacity and 160 Gbps (gigabytes per second) of uplink capacity. This represents an approximately 10-fold improvement in downlink capacity and an approximately 22-fold increase in uplink capacity of the Starlink V2 satellite,” SpaceX representatives wrote in a statement. description of the technology.
“The V3 satellite antennas support 2,048 downlink and uplink beams,” they added. “For comparison, the Starlink V2 satellite phased arrays supported 192 downlink beams and 144 uplink beams.”
With these and other improvements, “we will be able to deploy approximately 20 times the capacity per Starship launch into the constellation compared to a Falcon 9 V2 satellite launch,” SpaceX wrote.
And there will be many Starship Starlink launches in the months and years to come, if all goes according to plan.
The Starlink V3 constellation will ultimately be composed of approximately 100,000 satellitesaccording to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. Starship can carry around 60 Starlink V3s for each mission, so reaching 100,000 will require nearly 1,700 liftoffs. Of course, more will be needed to maintain the constellation; Starlink satellites have an operational lifespan of around five years, so they will need to be replaced regularly.
But Starship could fly even more frequently in service of another megaconstellation – one an order of magnitude larger. SpaceX intends to operate one million of its “Starmind” AI data centers into Earth orbit, and all will ride on the back of the Starship.
Indeed, SpaceX aims to launch Starship 10,000 times a year by 2030, Musk said — an outrageous pace that the company thinks is possible because the vehicle is designed to be fully and quickly reusable. For perspective: the Falcon 9 flew 165 times in 2025which was a record for the company and accounted for half of all orbital missions worldwide that year.
SpaceX has taken a big step toward achieving these ambitious goals with today’s success, but Starship still has a few boxes to check. For example, missions to the moon And March — which are definitely a possibility, according to SpaceX — will require the ship to be refueled in Earth orbit, something the company has yet to demonstrate.
And Ship will begin transporting humans to the Last Frontier in the near future, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX will therefore have to install a life support system in the spacecraft and launch a few test flights to demonstrate how it works.
SpaceX has considerable experience in this regard, having flown 20 astronaut missions aboard its Crew Dragon Capsule to this day. But Starship and Dragon, which typically only carry four people per flight, are very different vehicles, so some scaling will be necessary.
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