SpaceX plans to attempt catching Starship's upper-stage "ship" with its launch tower's mechanical arms on the vehicle's next test flight, Chief Executive Elon Musk said, a more difficult maneuver than the booster catches the company has already demonstrated several times during Starship's ongoing test campaign.
"Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight," Musk said, referring to Flight 14 of the Starship program. The company's most recent test, Flight 13, launched in late July and saw the ship survive atmospheric re-entry and splash down intact in the ocean, a result SpaceX engineers viewed as a strong signal that the vehicle was ready for a more ambitious recovery attempt.
A Harder Catch
SpaceX has successfully caught Starship's Super Heavy booster with the launch tower's giant mechanical arms, nicknamed "chopsticks," on several of the vehicle's roughly 13 suborbital test flights to date. Catching the much lighter, more aerodynamically complex upper-stage ship presents a different engineering challenge, requiring precise control during a steep, high-speed final descent rather than the more predictable trajectory of a returning booster.
The attempt has already slipped from an earlier target of late summer, with Musk citing a desire to fully review data from Flight 13 before committing to a date, and some reporting has tied part of the delay to the standard process of securing sign-off from the Federal Aviation Administration. SpaceX has not announced a firm launch date for Flight 14.
Why It Matters
A successful ship catch would be a major milestone toward SpaceX's goal of fully and rapidly reusing every part of the Starship system, a capability the company considers essential to dramatically lowering the cost of launch and supporting NASA's Artemis program, which has selected a Starship variant to land astronauts on the moon. SpaceX has said it ultimately wants to reach a cadence of roughly weekly Starship launches by early 2027, a pace that would be unattainable without reliably recovering and reflying both the booster and the ship.