SpaceX's Starship reached Earth orbit for the first time on Monday, on its 14th flight, and deployed all 26 of the new V3 Starlink satellites it was carrying. The ship lost one of its six Raptor engines during ascent, and SpaceX briefly held off on the orbital burn before giving the go-ahead for orbit a few minutes later.

All 13 earlier flights, the first in April 2023, were deliberately flown on suborbital paths.

The payload is the business story. SpaceX says Starlink made contact with all 26 V3 satellites, which should start serving customers within a few weeks. The V3s carry solar arrays producing twice the power of earlier generations and move data faster to subscribers. A fully loaded Starship can carry 60 of them, which SpaceX says is about 20 times the Starlink capacity a Falcon 9 launch delivers.

That is what the rocket is for. Starlink was SpaceX's largest segment and its only profitable one as of the second quarter, and the company operates around 11,000 active satellites against roughly 650 for Eutelsat OneWeb. The Super Heavy booster also flew its cleanest simulated landing yet over the Gulf of Mexico, a step towards making the whole system reusable.

Starship is central to SpaceX's NASA moon landing work, and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell has said the company plans to use it to launch AI compute satellites in 2027.

TechCrunch's Sean O'Kane reported the launch and the engine loss that nearly called off the orbital attempt. CNBC set out what it means for Starlink, including Elon Musk's comment in August that Starlink could at some point deliver a majority of the world's internet in countries where it is allowed to operate. Light Reading confirmed contact with all 26 satellites.

Once Starship flies regularly, adding Starlink capacity gets dramatically cheaper, because one launch now does the work of many. For customers in licensed markets, that should mean more bandwidth, faster rollout to new areas and room to cut prices.

Note Musk's own qualifier, though: countries where Starlink is allowed to operate. South Africa is not one of them. The licensing deadlock at Icasa over the 30% ownership rule is unresolved, while the DRC already has Starlink direct-to-phone service.

Every step that makes Starlink cheaper to expand widens the gap between markets that can buy it and markets that cannot. For local operators, this cuts both ways: the competitor they have been sheltered from just got a lot more efficient, and at some point the politics will change.

You might also like our piece on how SpaceX revenue doubled, the SA 5G coverage gap satellite could fill, and the probe heading for Alpha Centauri.

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