September 28

A New Road to Orbit

2008 — Falcon 1 Becomes the First Privately Developed Liquid-Fueled Rocket to Reach Orbit

23:15 UTC

On September 28, 2008, a slender two-stage rocket rose from Omelek Island, part of Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. It was called Falcon 1. The rocket had flown three times before. All three attempts had failed. The fourth would change the history of commercial spaceflight. At 23:15 UTC, Falcon 1 lifted off carrying a 165-kilogram inert payload known as RatSat, or Demosat. Minutes later, the rocket's second stage successfully reached Earth orbit. Falcon 1 had become the first privately developed and funded liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. Its builder was Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—SpaceX—a company founded only six years earlier. The achievement had been anything but inevitable. Falcon 1's first flight, in March 2006, ended less than a minute after launch when a fuel leak led to an engine fire. The second attempt, in March 2007, traveled much farther but failed to achieve orbit after problems during the second-stage portion of the flight. The third attempt came on August 3, 2008. This time the first stage performed well, but residual thrust caused it to recontact the second stage after separation. The rocket was lost along with several payloads. The failure was particularly painful because Falcon 1 was no longer simply an experimental vehicle. It was carrying real spacecraft. SpaceX engineers identified the problem and prepared another rocket with remarkable speed. Only 55 days later, Falcon 1 stood ready again. Flight 4 carried no operational satellite. Instead, RatSat served as a payload simulator. The first stage's Merlin engine carried the vehicle through the lower atmosphere. After stage separation, the second-stage Kestrel engine continued the climb. This time, the stages separated cleanly. The second stage reached an initial orbit of approximately 622 by 643 kilometers above Earth. Falcon 1 had succeeded. The payload itself remained attached to the second stage, but that did not change the central achievement: the launch vehicle had reached orbit. The importance of that accomplishment became clearer with time. Falcon 1 flew only once more, successfully, in July 2009. SpaceX then shifted its attention to the much larger Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft. In 2010, Falcon 9 reached orbit on its first flight. In 2012, Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. In 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage returned from an orbital-class mission and landed vertically on land. In 2016, another landed on a ship at sea. In 2020, SpaceX's Crew Dragon carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, restoring crewed orbital launch capability from the United States. And then, exactly 18 years after Falcon 1's breakthrough, another SpaceX rocket lifted from Texas. This one was very different. Falcon 1 had been designed to prove that a small privately developed rocket could reach orbit. Starship was being developed to change the scale at which payloads—and eventually people—could be transported through space. On September 28, 2008, however, none of that future was assured. Falcon 1 was small. Its operational life was brief. But Flight 4 demonstrated that a privately developed liquid-fueled launch vehicle could reach orbit.

Why It Matters: Falcon 1's fourth flight marked a turning point in commercial spaceflight. The achievement demonstrated that a comparatively young private company could develop and operate an orbital launch vehicle, helping open a path toward the commercial launch, cargo, human-spaceflight, and reusable rocket systems that became increasingly important during the following decades.

 

2026 — Starship Reaches Earth Orbit for the First Time

12:48 UTC

Eighteen years to the day after Falcon 1 first reached orbit, SpaceX tried again to cross an orbital threshold. The scale was almost unrecognizable. At 12:48 UTC on September 28, 2026, the enormous Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle lifted from Starbase, Texas, on Starship Flight 14. The mission was uncrewed. It was the fourteenth integrated flight of the Starship system. The previous thirteen flights had intentionally followed suborbital trajectories. Flight 14 was different. For the first time, SpaceX intended to place Starship into Earth orbit. Starship consists of two enormous reusable stages. The lower stage, Super Heavy, provides the tremendous thrust required to lift the vehicle away from Earth. Above it sits Starship, which serves simultaneously as the system's upper stage and spacecraft. Together, the current configuration stands approximately 124 meters—407 feet—tall. That makes the contrast with Falcon 1 extraordinary. Falcon 1 stood only about 21 meters tall. The rocket that established SpaceX's orbital capability in 2008 could almost have been placed several times end to end alongside Starship. But size was not the most important difference. The two vehicles represented fundamentally different ambitions. Falcon 1 was intended to place relatively small payloads into orbit. Starship is being developed as a fully and rapidly reusable transportation system capable of carrying very large payloads to Earth orbit and supporting future missions beyond Earth. NASA has also selected a specialized Starship derivative as a lunar landing system for its Artemis program. Before Starship could fulfill such ambitions, however, it had to accomplish one of the most fundamental requirements of any orbital transportation system. It had to reach orbit. Flight 14 began successfully. Super Heavy carried Starship through the lower atmosphere. The stages separated using the hot-staging technique developed during earlier test flights, in which Starship ignites its engines while still connected to the booster. Super Heavy then began its return toward the Gulf. The flight was not completely nominal. Some booster engines experienced problems during descent. More significantly, after stage separation, one of Starship's three sea-level Raptor engines shut down prematurely. For a time, it was uncertain whether the spacecraft would be able to proceed into orbit. Mission controllers evaluated the vehicle's condition. Then Starship performed the planned orbital-insertion maneuver. It worked. Starship was in orbit around Earth for the first time. The achievement crossed a line that all previous integrated Starship flights had deliberately stopped short of crossing. But Flight 14 was not simply an orbital demonstration. Starship was carrying a real operational payload. Inside were 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. Earlier in 2026, Flight 13 had demonstrated deployment of Starlink V3 spacecraft onto a suborbital trajectory. Those test satellites were expected to reenter shortly afterward. Flight 14 was different. Once Starship reached an orbit roughly 269 kilometers above Earth, it began releasing the 26 satellites. One after another, they separated from the spacecraft. All 26 were successfully deployed into their intended orbital environment. For the first time, Starship had not merely reached space as an experimental vehicle. It had delivered operational satellites to Earth orbit. That distinction matters. A launch vehicle becomes useful not simply when it can fly. Its purpose is to transport something. A scientific spacecraft. A communications satellite. Cargo. A crew. Or another vehicle bound for somewhere farther away. Falcon 1's breakthrough in 2008 had been accomplished with an inert payload that remained attached to its upper stage. Starship's orbital breakthrough eighteen years later included the deployment of working spacecraft. The mission nevertheless remained a developmental flight. The engine problem changed the planned profile. Flight 14 had originally been expected to remain in orbit for nearly ten hours and complete approximately six circuits of Earth. Instead, mission controllers shortened the flight to roughly three hours. Starship eventually began its controlled return. It reentered Earth's atmosphere and descended toward the Pacific Ocean. Near the end of the descent, the vehicle performed its characteristic flip maneuver, turning from a largely horizontal orientation toward vertical. It reached the ocean in a controlled splashdown. The spacecraft was not intended to be recovered from the sea for reuse. The Super Heavy booster likewise ended its flight in the water rather than returning to the launch site for capture. So Flight 14 did not demonstrate the complete, rapidly reusable transportation system SpaceX ultimately intends Starship to become. That work remained unfinished. But history is often made through intermediate thresholds. The Wright brothers' first flight did not produce practical commercial aviation. Sputnik did not create modern satellite communications. Falcon 1 did not create routine reusable launch operations. Each established that something previously uncertain could be done. Flight 14 established another such threshold. Starship could reach Earth orbit. And it could carry useful payloads there. The date made the achievement particularly striking. On September 28, 2008, SpaceX reached orbit for the first time. On September 28, 2026, Starship reached orbit for the first time. Exactly eighteen years separated the two flights. One rocket was a small vehicle launched from a remote Pacific island after three failures. The other was the largest launch system yet flown, rising from a sprawling launch complex on the Texas coast. Between them lay much of the history of twenty-first-century commercial spaceflight.

Why It Matters: Starship Flight 14 marked the vehicle's first successful entry into Earth orbit and its first deployment of operational satellites into orbit. Although an engine problem shortened the planned mission and the system had not yet achieved its goal of full and rapid reusability, reaching orbit moved Starship from a series of suborbital developmental flights into a new phase of testing and operations. Occurring exactly 18 years after Falcon 1 first reached orbit, the flight also provided a remarkable measure of how far SpaceX's launch capabilities had developed.

 

Also on This Day

1951 — Seth Nicholson Discovers Ananke, a Moon of Jupiter

Observation time not established

On September 28, 1951, American astronomer Seth Barnes Nicholson discovered another member of Jupiter's growing family of moons. The discovery was made photographically using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California. The object would eventually receive the name Ananke. By the middle of the twentieth century, astronomers had learned that Jupiter possessed two very different kinds of satellites. The four large moons discovered by Galileo in 1610—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—travel in relatively regular orbits close to the planet's equatorial plane. Farther away are much smaller irregular satellites. Ananke belongs to this second population. It travels around Jupiter in a distant, eccentric, highly inclined retrograde orbit, meaning that it moves in the direction opposite Jupiter's rotation. Those characteristics provide clues to its origin. Rather than forming alongside Jupiter in the disk of material surrounding the young planet, Ananke was probably associated with an object captured by Jupiter's gravity. Today astronomers recognize an entire Ananke group of small retrograde moons with similar orbital characteristics. One leading explanation is that they are fragments produced when a larger captured body was broken apart by a collision. Ananke itself has a mean radius of only about 14 kilometers. Nicholson was particularly skilled at discovering faint planetary satellites. During his career at Mount Wilson, he discovered several moons of Jupiter, greatly expanding the known architecture of the Jovian system. The contrast with modern planetary exploration is striking. Nicholson discovered Ananke as a tiny point recorded on a photographic plate. Decades later, spacecraft would transform other Jovian moons from points of light into complex worlds containing volcanoes, oceans, magnetic fields, mountains, craters, and icy terrain. Yet distant irregular moons such as Ananke remain reminders that even the planetary systems closest to us still contain populations whose histories must be reconstructed largely through careful astronomical observation.

Why It Matters: Ananke's discovery expanded the known Jovian satellite system and contributed to recognition that giant planets possess families of small irregular moons very different from their large regular satellites. Their unusual orbits preserve clues to capture, collision, and the violent early history of the solar system.

1953 — Edwin Hubble Dies

Time unknown

On September 28, 1953, American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble died in San Marino, California. Few astronomers had done more to enlarge humanity's conception of the universe. When Hubble began his most important work, astronomers were still debating the nature of the faint spiral objects visible through telescopes. Were they relatively small clouds located within the Milky Way? Or were they enormous systems of stars lying far beyond it? Using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson—the same instrument Seth Nicholson used in discovering Ananke—Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula. Cepheids were enormously valuable because their pulsation periods could be used to estimate their intrinsic luminosities. By comparing their actual luminosities with how faint they appeared from Earth, astronomers could calculate their distances. Hubble's measurements demonstrated that Andromeda was far too distant to lie within the Milky Way. The universe was suddenly much larger. The Milky Way was not the universe. It was one galaxy among many. Hubble then helped develop a system for classifying galaxies according to their appearance—spirals, barred spirals, ellipticals, and irregular systems. His work soon contributed to an even more profound discovery. Astronomers had measured the spectra of galaxies and found that many were redshifted, indicating recession. Combining galaxy-distance measurements with recession velocities, Hubble published in 1929 the relationship between distance and recession velocity that became fundamental to observational cosmology. The interpretation developed into one of the central pieces of evidence that the universe is expanding. The history deserves an important qualification. Hubble did not accomplish this alone. Vesto Slipher had already performed the difficult spectroscopic work that established the large radial velocities of spiral nebulae. Belgian astronomer and physicist Georges Lemaître had derived an expanding-universe solution from general relativity and, in 1927, published a relationship between distance and recession velocity before Hubble's famous 1929 paper. Modern historical treatments therefore place Hubble's achievements within a larger community of theoretical and observational work. His importance nevertheless remains immense. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was named in his honor. Its observations would extend the kind of extragalactic astronomy Hubble helped establish into realms he could scarcely have imagined.

Why It Matters: Edwin Hubble helped demonstrate that the Milky Way is only one galaxy among an enormous population of galaxies and provided crucial observational evidence associated with the expansion of the universe. His work was central to the transformation of astronomy into modern observational cosmology.

1971 — Luna 19 Launches to Map the Moon

Launch time not established

On September 28, 1971, the Soviet Union launched Luna 19, continuing an increasingly sophisticated program of robotic lunar exploration. By this point, Soviet spacecraft had already accomplished several historic lunar firsts. Luna 2 had become the first human-made object to reach another celestial body. Luna 3 had photographed the Moon's far side. Luna 9 had achieved the first successful soft landing. Luna 10 had become the first artificial satellite of the Moon. Luna 16 had returned lunar material robotically to Earth. And Lunokhod 1 was operating as the first successful remotely controlled rover on another world. Luna 19 represented another kind of investigation. Rather than landing, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit in early October and began systematically studying the Moon from above. Its scientific program included investigations of the Moon's gravitational field, surface environment, radiation conditions, and other properties. Orbital tracking was particularly useful for improving knowledge of variations in lunar gravity. Those variations were not merely academic. Earlier lunar spacecraft had revealed gravitational concentrations known as mascons—mass concentrations— beneath some of the Moon's great impact basins. Their gravitational pull could perturb the orbit of a spacecraft. Understanding the lunar gravity field was therefore important both scientifically and operationally. Luna 19 continued returning information from lunar orbit into 1972.

Why It Matters: Luna 19 formed part of the Soviet Union's broad robotic investigation of the Moon. Its orbital observations helped refine understanding of the lunar environment and gravity field, demonstrating that exploration required not merely reaching or landing on the Moon but systematically mapping and measuring it.

 

The Bigger Picture

September 28 now tells an unusually broad story about how humanity extends its reach. In 1951, Seth Nicholson used Mount Wilson's 100-inch Hooker Telescope to identify a tiny new moon orbiting Jupiter. Two years later, Edwin Hubble died, leaving behind a scientific legacy built in large part with that same telescope. That coincidence remains particularly evocative. Nicholson used the Hooker Telescope to enlarge our knowledge of a planetary system. Hubble used it to enlarge our conception of the universe. One instrument could reveal a faint moon accompanying a nearby planet and help demonstrate that apparently faint patches of light were actually enormous galaxies far beyond our own. Then came the Space Age. Luna 19 no longer needed to examine the Moon from Earth. Humanity could send an observatory into orbit around the Moon itself. And then another transformation began. For most of the Space Age, the ability to place substantial objects into orbit belonged principally to national governments and the large industrial organizations working for them. Falcon 1 suggested another model. Private companies might develop and operate their own orbital launch systems and sell transportation to governments, scientists, businesses, and other customers. But the Falcon 1 story also demonstrates that technological change rarely proceeds smoothly. The rocket that reached orbit on September 28 was Flight 4. Flights 1, 2, and 3 had failed. Had the story ended with any one of those attempts, Falcon 1 might have been remembered as an unsuccessful experiment. Instead, engineers examined what had gone wrong, changed the vehicle, and tried again. Fifty-five days after the third failure, Falcon 1 reached orbit. Then history provided September 28 with an extraordinary sequel. Exactly 18 years later, Starship Flight 14 reached orbit. The comparison between the two spacecraft almost summarizes the transformation. Falcon 1 was about 21 meters tall. Starship and Super Heavy stood roughly 124 meters tall. Falcon 1 carried an inert payload simulator that remained attached to its upper stage. Starship deployed 26 operational communications satellites. Falcon 1 demonstrated that SpaceX could reach orbit. Starship Flight 14 demonstrated that an enormously larger SpaceX vehicle could reach orbit and begin performing useful transportation work there. Yet the parallel becomes even more interesting because neither event represented a finished technology. Falcon 1's success was followed by Falcon 9, Dragon, reusable boosters, commercial cargo flights, and crewed missions. Starship Flight 14 likewise did not demonstrate everything its designers ultimately intend. The flight encountered engine problems. Its planned mission was shortened. Neither stage returned for reuse. Many difficult engineering milestones remain. That uncertainty belongs in the historical record too. A milestone is not the same thing as a finished journey. September 28 therefore illustrates something we encounter repeatedly throughout the history of astronomy and space exploration: progress is not the absence of failure. Very often, progress is what happens when people understand a failure well enough to make the next attempt different. It also reminds us that the significance of a technological achievement is sometimes clearest only years later. In 2008, nobody could know precisely what would grow from Falcon 1 Flight 4. We now have eighteen years of history with which to evaluate it. For Starship Flight 14, we do not. We know what happened. We know what threshold was crossed. But its ultimate place in the history of spaceflight will depend upon what comes next. That is an appropriate distinction for a project devoted to history. We can recognize a genuine milestone without pretending that its entire significance is already known. September 28 takes us from a photographic plate at Mount Wilson, to the scale of galaxies, to an orbiter circling the Moon, to a small commercial rocket struggling to reach Earth orbit, and finally to a giant experimental transportation system reaching orbit on the anniversary of that earlier breakthrough. The progression is remarkable: observe → understand → explore → reach orbit → expand what orbit can make possible.

 

At a Glance

1951 — Observation time not established — Seth Barnes Nicholson discovers Ananke, an irregular moon of Jupiter, on a photograph obtained with Mount Wilson's 100-inch Hooker Telescope.

1953 — Time unknown — Edwin Hubble dies in California, leaving a legacy that helped establish extragalactic astronomy and modern observational cosmology.

1971 — Launch time not established — The Soviet Union launches Luna 19, beginning a mission to study the Moon from orbit.

2008 — 23:15 UTC — Falcon 1 lifts off from Omelek Island and becomes the first privately developed and funded liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit.

2026 — 12:48 UTC — Starship Flight 14 launches from Starbase, Texas; Starship subsequently reaches Earth orbit for the first time and deploys 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites.