SpaceX Launches Starship Rocket in Attempt to Reach Orbit

SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket early Monday in an effort to reach orbit with the spacecraft for the first time.

The Federal Aviation Administration told CNBC by email that it issued a "license authorization for the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Flight 14 launch and reentry operations" on Sept. 26. With the 14th test flight of Starship, Elon Musk's aerospace and defense company also plans to deploy 26 of its new Starlink V3 satellites.

A livestream of the test flight on social network X, which is owned by SpaceX, showed the rocket taking off at 8:48 a.m. ET, or 7:48 a.m. local time, from the company town of Starbase, Texas.

The ship's booster made a "soft splashdown" off the coast of Starbase a few moments after launch, while the Starship spacecraft continued to climb with one of its vacuum engines going out in sub-orbital trajectory.

Starship is critical to SpaceX's expansion plans. The company is counting on the giant rocket to scale its Starlink, or Connectivity, business, which was its largest and only profitable segment as of the second quarter. SpaceX operates around 11,000 active satellites in orbit today, compared to roughly 650 for competitor Eutelsat OneWeb.

On SpaceX's earnings call in August, Musk said, "It's not out of the question that at some point, Starlink will deliver a majority of the world's internet, at least in countries where we're allowed to operate, which is the vast majority of countries."

SpaceX went public in June in the largest IPO on record and is now valued at about $2 trillion.

SpaceX has designed its Starship Super Heavy rocket and booster to be fully reusable, and to lift more cargo for less cost into orbit than any prior spacecraft. None of the 13 earlier test flights have been intended to make it into orbit, but with the 14th flight, SpaceX is hoping Starship will circle the planet.

The company is preparing Starship for a major NASA test flight next year, and intends to use the rocket to bring U.S. astronauts back to the moon's surface.

SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said during the All-In Summit earlier this month that the company also plans to use Starship to put "supercompute in space," launching "AI compute satellites" into orbit in 2027.

The company's new v3 satellites, which are produced at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, are equipped with solar arrays that generate twice as much power as prior generations. They are also larger, and designed to be more powerful, transmitting data more rapidly than earlier versions to Starlink subscribers.