After 14 orbits and 22 hours of orbit for Flight 15, SpaceX finally caught the upper stage of Starship with the mechanical arms of its launch tower at Starbase, Texas, on Saturday, bringing Ship 42 back to the pad about 22.5 hours after liftoff.
It is the first time SpaceX has recovered a Starship upper stage, and AP reported it as the first tower catch of a vehicle returning from space. The ship settled into the arms at about 4:20 p.m. ET, around 2:50 a.m. IST on Sunday. SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said afterwards: “We caught a Starship and now, everything changes.”
Flight 15 was meant to catch both stages, and the booster half did not work. Elon Musk said Booster 22’s engines slightly underperformed and left it short of propellant, and that the fix is more consistent Raptor V3.2 engines plus a software change to cut the engines about a second earlier. SpaceX first described the abort as a guidance, navigation and control issue, and engineer Kate Tice later said early indications were that the boostback burn ended early on a low fuel mass alarm. The booster aborted its own return to the tower on Friday and was diverted to the Gulf of Mexico, where its flight termination system triggered. Booster 22 was the first V3 Super Heavy to attempt a catch, and the three previous booster catches were all V1 boosters.
Ship 42 reached an orbit of roughly 265 to 275 km, released all 26 Starlink V3 satellites, three of them fitted with cameras to inspect the heat shield, and completed 14 laps of Earth. SpaceX permits a return to the launch site only if the vehicle meets FAA-approved conditions, and said it could have ended the flight with an ocean splashdown instead.
Tower catches had so far been limited to boosters, first on Flight 5 in October 2024, with the ship flown to a planned ocean splashdown each time. Flight 14, on September 28, was the first Starship flight to reach orbit and deploy an operational payload. Ship 42 is the second upper stage to reach orbit, and the first to come back to the tower from it.
Starship is also the vehicle NASA has contracted as its Artemis lunar lander. Musk said the booster loss does not change SpaceX’s timeline for high-volume, fully reusable flights, and before launch he had put the odds of catching the ship at “more likely than not.”