SpaceX Targets Friday for Starship Flight 15 at Starbase: the First Attempt to Catch Both Stages
The window opens Friday at 4:45 p.m. in South Texas. If it flies, Booster 22 comes back to the tower in about seven minutes — and Ship 42 would not come back for more than 22 hours, after some 14 orbits and 26 Starlink satellites.
STARBASE — The biggest rocket in the world is scheduled to fly from the Texas coast on Friday the 13th, and for the first time SpaceX plans to bring both of its stages home to the same tower. Starship Flight 15 is targeted for a 75-minute window opening at 4:45 p.m. CST on Friday, November 13, from Pad 2 at Starbase, the company's South Texas spaceport near the U.S.–Mexico border — pending regulatory approval, which the mission plan still lists as outstanding.
The flight profile is the most ambitious the programme has published. Booster 22, which was moved to the launch pad on November 10 and put through final catch testing — including a suspended squeeze test at catch height — would separate and return to the tower for a catch at about six and a half minutes after liftoff. SpaceX has caught a Super Heavy booster three times before, most recently in March 2025. The ship, Ship 42, would go on to orbit: about 14 circuits of the Earth at roughly 275 kilometres, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites along the way.
Then comes the part that has never been tried. About 22 and a half hours after liftoff — on Saturday — Ship 42 is planned to fly back over northern Mexico and South Texas and descend to the Starbase tower for a catch of the upper stage, something no orbital rocket programme has done. The return is conditional, and SpaceX's plan says so plainly: flight controllers will approve the ship's return only if the systems needed for re-entry, the landing burn and the tower approach are healthy, under conditions the FAA has approved. If anything reads wrong, the ship is diverted to the ocean instead.
Flight 15 follows Flight 14 on September 28, Starship's first flight to reach orbit, which deployed Starlink satellites and ended in a planned splashdown in the northern Pacific about three hours after launch. Friday's mission stretches that template from three hours to nearly a full day, and its success or failure will be decided in two acts a day apart: the booster's catch on Friday evening, and the ship's on Saturday. A live webcast is planned from about 30 minutes before liftoff through the ship's return. The date can still move — regulatory approval is the open item, and airspace notices give the programme room to slip into the following week.
