Starship reaches orbit 18 years to the day after Falcon 1

SpaceX first reached orbit on September 28, 2008. Falcon 1, fourth attempt, after three straight failures left the company with money for exactly one more launch. Starship reached orbit this morning. September 28, 2026. Eighteen years to the day. The 2008 rocket carried a 364-pound aluminum dummy payload because no customer would risk real hardware on a vehicle that kept blowing up. Today's ship carried 26 Starlink V3 satellites, the first operational payload Starship has ever flown, into a constellation that already has nearly 13,000 satellites launched. What people forget is how deliberate the wait was. All 13 previous Starship flights were intentionally suborbital. Every trajectory was designed so that even if the vehicle lost control completely, it would still come down in a…