Satellite signatures of the SpaceX Starship Flight 14 launch
The launch of SpaceX Starship Flight 14 occurred at 12:48 UTC on 28 September 2026, from their Starbase facility along the South Texas coast. 1-minute imagery was not available for this launch — as it was for several previous Starship launches, most recently Flight 11 and Flight 9 — but the CONUS Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Water Vapor imagery at 1251 UTC (which was actually scanning the launch site around 12:52:20 UTC) captured the hottest thermal signature of the six Starship engines (red pixels), along with their trail of warm water vapor (brighter shades of yellow to darker shades of blue) as the rocket was ascending southeastward over the Gulf of Mexico (above).
In a sequence of interleaved CONUS Sector and Full Disk scan GOES-19 Rocket Plume RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below), the Full Disk image at 1250 UTC revealed hot thermal signatures (brighter shades of yellow-green) of both the “boostback burn” of the Super Heavy booster and the accelerating Starship (immediately following the separation of those two rocket stages).
A more oblique view from GOES-18 (GOES-West) using a Full Disk scan True Color RGB image at 1250 UTC (below) — which was actually scanning the launch site around 12:52:29 UTC — depicted the Super Heavy rocket booster’s lower-tropospheric condensation cloud near the Texas coast, in addition to the long shadow that was being cast west-northward across the Texas/Mexico border region (as the early morning sun was rising in the east).
The Super Heavy rocket booster condensation cloud (and its shadows) were also seen from an Earth-looking camera on Starship (below).
