SpaceX eyes first-ever double catch of Starship and booster on Flight 15

SpaceX is aiming to catch both halves of its rocket on the next Starship test. Elon Musk announced on X that Flight 15 will feature a dual tower catch: the Super Heavy booster and, for the first time, the Ship upper stage itself. If both land in the chopstick arms of the Mechazilla tower, it would be the first time every part of an orbital rocket has returned to Earth intact — a milestone Musk calls essential to making life multiplanetary.

The booster half of the trick is already proven. SpaceX has caught V1 boosters three times, on Flights 5, 7 and 8, and some of those boosters have flown again. Catching the Ship is a different beast. It comes back from orbital velocity after dropping off its payload, which means far more energy, punishing heat loads, and a precisely choreographed sequence: belly-flop reentry, a flip maneuver, and a final landing burn to settle between the tower's arms.

Flight 15 is targeted for no earlier than Friday, November 13, from Orbital Launch Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas, pending regulatory approval. The 75-minute window opens at 4:45 p.m. CT. Booster 22 and Ship 42, both Block 3 vehicles, are on deck. After hot staging and separation, the booster is slated to come back for its catch about 6 minutes and 35 seconds after liftoff.

The Ship has a much longer day ahead. It's set to insert into a roughly 275 km orbit, deploy 26 advanced Starlink V3 satellites, and run about 14 orbits over more than 22 hours. If systems check out, it will fire a deorbit burn, reenter, flip and burn for a tower catch at roughly T+22 hours and 32 minutes. SpaceX showed a simulation of exactly that during its October earnings call, with the Ship dropping in belly-first before flipping upright for the arms.

There are backdoors if things go sideways. Contingency splashdown zones are set up in the Gulf of Mexico for the booster and the Pacific for the Ship. SpaceX has stressed it will run rigorous health checks before committing the Ship to a return-to-launch-site trajectory, and Musk has pegged the odds of success on this first dual-catch attempt as “more likely than not,” according to Teslarati. More flights are already on the schedule if this one doesn't stick.

Full recovery is the whole point. Getting both stages back means fast inspection, refurbishment and reflight, which would slash costs and feed the launch cadence SpaceX needs for Starlink expansion, lunar missions and eventual Mars settlement. Musk's framing is blunt: this is “the critical breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.”