SpaceX's latest Starship mission reached low-Earth orbit

…with some small hiccups along the way. SpaceX’s latest Starship mission reached low-Earth orbit. Tomorrow Space SpaceX’s latest Starship mission reached low-Earth orbit The successful mission also deployed 26 of SpaceX’s latest Starlink satellites.

SpaceX kicked off this major undertaking early Monday morning but had to deal with some hiccups on the way, including losing one of its six Raptor engines. Ultimately, SpaceX decided to push on with the mission and successfully reached orbit albeit with some compromise. SpaceX originally planned to have Starship orbit Earth six times over a span of nearly 10 hours for the Flight 14 mission.

With one of the engines offline, the plan changed to only spend about three hours in orbit before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing in the Pacific Ocean. As part of the same mission, SpaceX managed to deploy 26 of its Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. SpaceX said that its Starlink team has made contact with all newly-deployed 26 satellites in orbit, which will eventually be used to improve Internet speeds for customers.

While previous Starship missions also carried several V3 satellites, they only remained in suborbital space and served as test flights to see if the new satellites would connect to the existing Starlink constellation.