STARBASE, November 13, 2026 — SpaceX is preparing to launch its 15th Starship test flight this evening, aiming to catch both stages of the world’s largest rocket for the first time in history. The 75-minute window opens at 5:45 p.m. EST from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas.
The mission profile
If all goes to plan, the Super Heavy booster — designated Booster 22 — will push the Ship upper stage through the dense lower atmosphere before separating roughly six and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster will then flip around and return to the launch tower for capture by the “chopstick” arms of the Mechazilla system, a manoeuvre SpaceX has pulled off three times before. Meanwhile, Ship will continue to orbit, circling Earth approximately 14 times over the next 22 hours.
During that orbital phase, the upper stage will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, the newest generation of SpaceX’s broadband constellation. Then comes the part that has never been done: Ship must survive a high-speed reentry from orbital velocity and guide itself back to the same tower for a second catch attempt. The landing would occur on Saturday, November 14, around 4:17 p.m. EST if the launch happens at the window’s opening.
How it works
The science behind the catch is brutally straightforward in principle. The tower’s massive steel arms close around hard points on the rocket’s body, eliminating the need for landing legs and the weight they add. Intriguingly, this also means the vehicle must hit a precise three-dimensional box in space — position, velocity, and attitude all at once — or the arms have nothing to grab.
What researchers found in earlier flights is that the thermal protection system on Ship — thousands of hexagonal tiles backed by ablative material — can survive the heating, but only if the vehicle maintains the correct angle of attack. Flight 14 in September reached orbit for the first time, yet an engine problem forced controllers to cut the planned ten-hour mission to about three hours. The booster on that flight splashed down in the Gulf rather than attempting a tower catch.
The stakes
Starship is a two-stage, fully reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended as the successor to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. As of September 28, 2026, the programme has flown 14 times with nine successes and five failures. Full reusability is the mechanism that could slash launch costs by an order of magnitude, since the expensive part of a rocket is the hardware, not the propellant. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas called a successful double catch potentially “the biggest positive catalyst since the IPO” for SpaceX stock. Elon Musk told the October earnings call that success was “more likely than not.”
The architecture is also the backbone of NASA’s Artemis lunar programme, which plans to use a Starship variant to land astronauts on the Moon in 2028, and of Musk’s longer-term goal of sending crews to Mars. Catching both stages on the same flight would prove the rapid-turnaround cycle — refuel, re-stack, relaunch — that makes those missions plausible.
What comes next
SpaceX has not formally announced backup launch dates, though past campaigns have typically held the same window on subsequent days if weather or technical issues force a scrub. The local window at Starbase runs from 4:45 p.m. to 6 p.m. CST. If the launch slips to the end of the window at 7 p.m. EST, Ship’s return catch would shift to Saturday at 5:32 p.m. EST.
Sources
- SpaceX's Starship megarocket will launch to orbit on Nov. 13. Will you be able to spot it in the night sky?
- SpaceX's Starship megarocket will launch to orbit on Nov. 13. Will you be able to spot it in the night sky?
- What time will SpaceX launch Starship Flight 15, its 1st double landing test, on Nov. 13? (Full mission timeline)
- SpaceX Starship Flight 15 could be a major step toward full rocket reusability and cheaper missions
- Nov. 13 Could Be a Huge Day for SpaceX Stock
Photo: Jenny Hautmann (CC BY-SA 4.0)
