FLYING Magazine
SpaceX on Tuesday announced that the 14th test flight of its Starship rocket will launch as soon as September 22, bringing with it more airspace restrictions for pilots and excitement for space enthusiasts.
Flight 14 of Starship—which stands about 400 feet tall when stacked on its Super Heavy booster—will be a big one for SpaceX. The company said it will attempt the ship’s first orbital test flight, whereas the previous 13 missions have all been suborbital. Also unlike previous missions, Starship is intended to splash down in the Pacific Ocean, likely requiring different aircraft hazard areas (AHAs) than prior flights.
Starship exploded on two test flights in early 2025, requiring the FAA to activate debris response areas (DRAs) to divert aircraft away from falling debris. Those measures kept pilots out of harm’s way, with no reports of aircraft being hit by debris in either incident.
The FAA will have the same tools at its disposal for the more ambitious Flight 14, for which AHAs and potential DRAs have not yet been communicated. But more information should be forthcoming in the days ahead.
Starship Flight 14: What Pilots Need to Know
Air traffic control (ATC) uses temporary flight restrictions (TFRs), stationary altitude reservation (ALTRV), ATC-Assigned Airspace (ATCAA), and other measures to create AHAs. The hazard areas are relayed to pilots via Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) about 48 to 72 hours in advance of a planned launch, according to the FAA Safety Briefing Magazine.
Starship Flight 14 will launch from Starbase in south Texas. The mission’s 75-minute launch window will open at 8:15 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 22, per SpaceX. According to the FAA’s current operations plan, a backup window would open at the same time the following day should the initial attempt be scrubbed.
Starship test flight AHAs have expanded as SpaceX has introduced larger, more powerful variants that pose greater risk of hazards should they suffer anomalies. The current Version 3 (V3) Starship is the largest yet, designed to deliver 100 metric tons of payload to low-Earth orbit (LEO). AHAs could continue to grow in the future with more complex mission profiles.
When a spacecraft does suffer an anomaly, the FAA activates a DRA to warn aircraft in the vicinity of the potential for falling debris, diverting them or placing them in holding patterns until the area is clear. Starship has experienced anomalies on about half of its test flights, though not all required DRAs.
Pilots planning to fly on September 22 or 23 should take extra care to study NOTAMs. Ops Group, a community of about 10,000 pilots, flight dispatchers, schedulers, and controllers that runs a digital blog, contends that the notices were not designed to cover the true impact of launching a spacecraft as large as Starship.
In August, Ops Group in a blog post said one of its members, a medevac jet pilot, departed an airport in Guatemala and was unexpectedly turned around by ATC near the Belize-Mexico border after SpaceX launched Starship Flight 13 on July 24.
“The crew briefed normally, via ForeFlight, before departure,” the post reads. “The key problem is that the system they were relying on wasn’t built for what a major SpaceX launch actually does to the airspace.”
The AHAs for Flight 13 crossed multiple flight information regions (FIRs), each of which must publish its own NOTAM, creating a patchwork of airspace restrictions. Mexico and Cuba each issued their own warnings covering their respective airspace.
“Only if you plot every FIR’s NOTAMs together do you see the whole thing adds up to an east/west wall blocking traffic spanning from Southern Texas, across the Gulf and Caribbean, all the way down to Barbados and the Lesser Antilles,” the blog post reads.
The FAA as of Wednesday has not shared Flight 14 restrictions for U.S. airspace. But it did publish on federal NOTAM systems two NOTAMs for Mexico’s FIR. Each includes a list of coordinates that outline “dangerous areas” for Flight 14.
The FAA did not respond to FLYING’s inquiry about when AHAs for U.S. airspace might be available. Pilots should check for them in the days and hours leading up to the planned launch.
The agency in January advised pilots to use “extreme caution” when flying below the trajectory of commercial spacecraft.
What Space Enthusiasts Should Look For
Starship Flight 14 could be the first test flight to send the rocket into orbit, whereas previous suborbital missions have forced the ship back to Earth before it could circle the planet. It will need to hit speeds close to 17,500 mph to counteract the pull of Earth’s gravity.
“A useful way to visualize the concept involves firing a cannonball,” SpaceX wrote in a Tuesday update. “The more power you fire it with, the longer it will travel before gravity pulls it down in an arc to the ground. Fire it with enough power and the ground keeps dropping out from under the ball. That resulting endless freefall is being in orbit.”
Starship’s first 13 test flights flew what SpaceX described as a “passively safe suborbital trajectory,” which “effectively meant that when Starship’s engines turned off at the end of its ascent burn, it did not have the forward velocity necessary to achieve orbit.”
“These trajectories are considered ‘passively safe’ because even if control over the spacecraft was completely lost, it was already on a path to reenter the atmosphere and splash down in a predetermined location,” the company said.
Starship on Flight 14 will begin its mission in the same passively safe suborbital trajectory as previous missions. It will have the opportunity to remain on that flight path should SpaceX determine an orbital trajectory is unsafe.
“Starship will only execute a burn to enter orbit after the flight control team has ensured there is sufficient redundancy on hardware critical to doing the subsequent deorbit burn at the end of the mission,” the company wrote.
The ship could also deorbit at “multiple predetermined areas over the ocean” should personnel discover issues with its power, attitude control, propellant tanks, or flight computers and navigation sensors.
SpaceX said that by reaching orbit, the “next phase of developing Starship to be fully and rapidly reusable can begin.” The company has caught and reflown the rocket’s Super Heavy booster but not its upper stage. That is one of the targets it hopes to achieve on upcoming missions, though Flight 14 will not attempt an upper stage catch.
Instead, the primary goal is for the ship to fly about 275 kilometers above Earth and complete approximately six orbits around the planet over the course of a nearly 10-hour flight. Another objective will be to complete the first deployment of operational, next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, which previous iterations of Starship were not capable of deploying. The ship will carry 26 V3 satellites, SpaceX said.
Following the deployment, the plan is for the vehicle to execute a deorbit burn and make a controlled reentry, descent, and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Flight 9 in 2025 experienced an uncontrolled reentry, which can pose more danger to areas below the flight path, after it lost attitude control following an anomaly.
According to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, a controlled reentry normally uses more propellant and a larger propulsion system to achieve a steeper flight path angle when a rocket reenters the atmosphere. That will be the goal for Flight 14. But as SpaceX noted, it will forgo an orbital mission if it believes the ship to be incapable of performing a deorbit burn, which would put it on that steeper reentry trajectory.
If the launch proceeds nominally, Starship is expected to reenter the atmosphere about nine hours and 30 minutes after launch. Should it reach that point, there will be “excitement guaranteed,” in SpaceX’s parlance.
Flight 14 will be streamed live on SpaceX’s website and X account.