SpaceX
SpaceX’s steel Starship glows during Earth reentry in first high-quality render
SpaceX has silently published the first known detailed render of its new stainless steel Starship’s design on the cover of Popular Mechanic’s April 2019 issue, showing the next-generation orbital spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere in a blaze of glowing metal and plasma.
Despite the fact that the render seems to only be available in print and then only through one particular news outlet, Teslarati has acquired a partial-resolution copy of the image to share the latest official glimpse of SpaceX’s Starship with those who lack the means, access, or interest to purchase a magazine. Matters of accessibility aside, SpaceX’s updated render offers a spectacular view of Starship’s exotic metallic heat shield in action, superheating the atmosphere around it to form a veil of plasma around the spacecraft’s hull. According to CEO Elon Musk, the hottest parts of Starship’s skin will be reinforced with hexagonal tiles of steel and transpiration cooling, a largely unproven technology that SpaceX is already in the process of testing.
Aside from one additional view – again only distributed to Popular Mechanic – showing a far wider angle of a SpaceX Starship entering the Martian atmosphere and video shown by CEO Elon Musk to students in Flint, MI a few days ago, this appears to be the first official render of an unequivocally metallic Starship. Aside from its shiny steel exterior, this latest render also offers an exceptionally-illustrated artist’s interpretation of what a Starship with metallic thermal protection might look like during reentry, appearing to take into account a number of things that set such a system apart from traditional heat shielding.
Aside from NASA’s Space Shuttle, which used fragile tiles of insulating material in its reusable heat shield, no other spacecraft have been flown with a primary heat shields that experiences little to no ablation, meaning that the material itself is not eroded during peak heating. Ablative heat shields like the PICA-X system used on SpaceX’s Crew and Cargo Dragons produce distinctly different ‘tails’ during reentry, mainly as a result of the addition of ablated material, much like injecting different elements into a fire or using different materials in rocket nozzles can drastically change the color (and sometimes behavior) of the flame.
While the extreme compressive heating of spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere at many miles/kilometers per second produces plasma instead of what humans recognize as fire, the general idea remains the same. Comparing the reentry tails of spacecraft like the Apollo Command Module, the Space Shuttle, and Orion makes it clear that each vehicle and heat shield produces a subtle but distinctly unique plasma tail over the course of several minutes of peak reentry heating, when the vehicle’s velocity is fast enough to compress atmospheric gases into plasma. Different ablators end up injecting different gases into the superheated plasma tail, hence the different appearance of each tail.
Transpiration cooling will be added wherever we see erosion of the shield. Starship needs to be ready to fly again immediately after landing. Zero refurbishment.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2019
Aside from a unique lack of ablation for Starship’s stainless steel hull and curious hexagonal steel heat shield tiles, SpaceX may end up having to implement a wholly unproven technology known as transpiration cooling, in which some of
It’s unclear what the resulting methane-rich plasma plume might look like but it’s not out of the question that SpaceX’s graphic design team have either done the math themselves, so to speak, or asked engineers to verify what color Starship’s plasma tail might end up looking like. As shown in the latest render, a plume of hues ranging from light blue and indigo to red through white seems entirely plausible. Regardless, Starship is bound to look spectacular during orbital reentries thanks to its metallic skin and shield and planned hot structure, meaning that the entire windward half of the vehicle could end up glowing red, orange, yellow, and even white-hot, precisely like the thermal testing video Musk recently shared.
SpaceX’s first orbital Starship prototype is already under construction at the company’s ad-hoc South Texas ‘shipyard’, for lack of a better term. According to Musk, that vehicle could be ready to be done “around June” of this year, while its complimentary Super Heavy booster could begin assembly as early as April thru June, as well.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Starship reached orbit despite losing an engine, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites on Flight 14.
SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday, and for a few nail-biting minutes it looked like it wouldn’t. During ascent on Flight 14, one of Ship 41’s six Raptor engines shut down early, and SpaceX’s livestream host Dan Huot told viewers the team had decided not to commit to orbit. Minutes later, after what Huot described as a lot of conversation in the control room, the final poll came back in favor, and a roughly 19 second burn of a single Raptor pushed the ship into orbit about 170 miles up.
The reversal matters because SpaceX had written the exit ramp into the mission plan. The company said it would only fire the orbital insertion burn if flight controllers confirmed enough backup hardware remained for the deorbit burn, a condition Teslarati laid out ahead of the flight. Losing an engine was exactly the scenario that rule was built for.
Pressing forward fits Elon Musk’s history. Falcon 1 failed three straight times before its fourth launch reached orbit in 2008, with SpaceX nearly out of money, and Starship was developed by flying prototypes until they broke. What changed this year SpaceX going public, and with $SPCX sliding below its IPO price in July when Flight 13 slipped, the short interest climbed significantly, as Teslarati reported at the time. A Starship potentially lost today with revenue generating next-gen Starlink satellites aboard would have landed directly on shareholders.
Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship! pic.twitter.com/urjmiwnvNl
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 28, 2026
That pressure showed up after orbit. SpaceX cut a flight planned to last nearly 10 hours to about three, moving splashdown from west of Chile to the North Pacific near Hawaii. SpaceX gave no reason, though Musk said this month the company was being extremely cautious about debris risk. The single Raptor for deorbit worked, and Ship 41 completed its flip and landing burn before breaking apart in the water, an outcome SpaceX expected. Musk has structured SpaceX’s governance to shield long term bets from market pressure.
The payload is the bigger business story. Musk posted that all 26 Starlink V3 satellites deployed and are “operating nominally.” Each V3 is rated for about 1 Tbps of downlink and 160 Gbps of uplink, so this single launch adds roughly 26 Tbps, about 10 times what a Falcon 9 load of V2 Mini satellites adds. The V3 is too large for Falcon 9, making Starship the only vehicle that can build out the planned 100,000 satellite constellation, at up to 60 per flight once it reaches routine service. Unlike the 20 V3 units on Flight 13, which reentered on a suborbital path, these will raise their orbits and could begin serving customers within weeks and bring in hundreds of millions of additional dollars in projected Starlink revenue.
SpaceX has already begun winding down Falcon 9 Starlink launches from Florida in favor of Starship. Reported targets put Flight 15 as early as October 19, leaving about three weeks to diagnose Monday’s engine shutdown before the next orbital attempt.
Starship’s 14th flight is set to launch on Monday, Sept 28. The 75-minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT. Live coverage of the mission starts ~35 minutes before launch → https://t.co/uQKQvgaTmJ
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 27, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceX just got the green light Starship has waited years for
The FAA has cleared Starship Flight 14, setting up SpaceX’s first orbital attempt on Monday.
SpaceX has cleared the last regulatory hurdle standing between Starship and its first trip to orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration issued the launch license for Starship Flight 14 late Saturday, keeping the mission on track for liftoff Monday, September 28, from Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas.
The 75 minute launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central, and Boca Chica Beach closures are also scheduled for September 29 and 30 as backup dates. This will be Starship’s first revenue generating mission.
The license was the missing piece after SpaceX completed a full wet dress rehearsal with Booster 21 and Ship 41 on September 24. At the time, the company said the flight remained on track pending regulatory approval. Because Flight 14 flies an orbital profile, the FAA had to sign off on a modified license that met its safety, payload and financial responsibility requirements.
Observers combing through the new FAA paperwork also noticed that lightning no longer appears among Starship’s listed launch hazards. If that holds, it matters more for where Starship is headed than for Monday’s attempt. Florida and Louisiana, home to LC-39A and the planned Starbase Louisiana site, see some of the most frequent lightning in the United States.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Flight 14 is the mission SpaceX has been building toward for months. Ship 41 will carry 26 Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational V3 units to be deployed, and attempt roughly six orbits at about 275 kilometers over a flight lasting just under 10 hours. SpaceX says the ship will only perform its orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm enough hardware redundancy remains for the deorbit burn at the end of the mission. Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific west of Chile, while Super Heavy will return to the Gulf of Mexico.
The date carries some symbolism as well. A Monday launch would come 10 years and one day after Elon Musk first presented the Interplanetary Transport System, the design that became Starship, at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.
SpaceX has not announced what comes next, but air traffic planning slides reported this week, list Flight 15 no earlier than October 19 and a first Starship launch from LC-39A in Florida no earlier than October 30. Both dates depend on how Monday goes.
News
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
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SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
