SpaceX will try to catch both halves of Starship on Flight 15, as soon as November 13

SpaceX wants to catch the whole rocket this time. Starship’s Flight 15, targeted for as early as Friday, November 13 pending regulatory approval, is planned as the first mission where both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage fly back to the launch site and get caught by the tower’s arms.

If it works, SpaceX says it will be the first time an orbital launch system has been recovered in full. Boosters alone have been caught before: three first-generation Super Heavy boosters were grabbed on earlier tests, and two of them flew again. Flight 15 brings the first catch attempt for the newer V3 booster.

The upper stage has the longer day. It is meant to reach orbit at about 275 km, circle Earth roughly 14 times over more than 22 hours and deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites before heading home. SpaceX says each of those satellites adds 1 terabit of capacity, so the batch equals about 10 Falcon 9 launches of the current V2 Mini satellites.

Three of the satellites carry cameras to inspect Starship’s heatshield in orbit, part of the evidence the team will use before allowing the ship to come back to Starbase. The heatshield keeps the fixes made for Flight 14, including extra retention on tiles most likely to fall off and a curved tile shape that reduces heating in the gaps. If any system needed for reentry or the final approach looks unhealthy, the ship will skip the tower and deorbit over the ocean instead.

That fallback says a lot: the catch is a goal, not a promise. SpaceX plans a live webcast on X starting about 30 minutes before liftoff and potentially continuing for hours, through the catch.

Reported by SpaceX, SpaceX on X. Compiled with AI tools.