Starship Flight 15: SpaceX catches a ship for the first time, after losing the booster in the Gulf

Update, 9.21pm UK time, 14 November: SpaceX has confirmed a successful catch. The company posted: "Mechazilla catches Starship! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on this incredible achievement!" It is the first time a Starship upper stage has been caught at the launch tower. Three minutes earlier, SpaceX said the ship was "executing a banking maneuver and final approach as it returns to Starbase for a catch".

SpaceX has already done the hard bit and, as these things often go, immediately found a new hard bit. Starship Flight 15 left Starbase in South Texas at 10.47pm UK time on Friday 13 November, put Ship 42 into orbit, and deployed a fresh batch of 26 Starlink V3 satellites. The Super Heavy booster, Booster 22, did not make it home. Tonight, having already lost the booster on Friday, the company pulled off something it had never done before: catching the ship itself.

When we first published, just after 9pm, Ship 42 was already back in the atmosphere and a catch was due around 9.20pm UK time. The official word came at 9.21pm.

What happened on Friday night

Liftoff was at 4.47pm local time in Texas, which is 10.47pm in the UK, as reported by Space.com and Spaceflight Now. SpaceX had billed it as the first flight to try returning both stages to the launch tower to be plucked out of the sky by the "chopstick" arms. If both had worked, the company said, it would have been "the first full recovery of an orbital launch system". Catching a stainless-steel spaceship with a pair of mechanical chopsticks still sounds like a dare someone made at closing time, and yet here we are.

The climb itself looked tidy. About two minutes after liftoff, SpaceX posted that hot-staging had gone to plan: "Hot-staging separation! Starship’s Raptor engines have ignited, and the Super Heavy is boosting back towards Starbase for a catch." Four minutes later, that catch was off, as SpaceNews also reported. The official account said, bluntly, "Super Heavy has diverted to an offshore splashdown in the Gulf." A later post confirmed a "Landing burn and splashdown for Super Heavy Booster 22."

What the cameras showed was rather less polite. Space.com and Spaceflight Now both reported that the booster's flight termination system fired a few feet above the water, and that the vehicle broke up before remaining propellant burned off. SpaceX has not yet published a finished accident report, but it has tightened the early explanation. Commentator Dan Huot first pointed to a guidance, navigation and control issue, then walked that back on Saturday, as quoted by Space.com: "It was not a GNC issue that caused us not to come back. GNC triggered that abort; it was doing what it was supposed to do." Later on Saturday, spokesperson Kate Tice said on the webcast: "Early indications are that the booster ended its boostback [burn] early due to a low fuel mass alarm." Guidance then "detected that it wasn't in the right position" and sent the booster out to sea instead. The team, she said, is still investigating the root cause.

This was the first catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster. SpaceX's own mission page notes that three earlier V1 boosters were caught successfully, and two of those later flew again. Version 3 is still waiting for its moment.

Ship 42, meanwhile, got on with the job. At 10.57pm UK time, SpaceX said the ascent burn was complete and the vehicle was "on a planned suborbital trajectory as teams check systems to confirm we are good to proceed to orbit today". They were. A follow-up post gave the plan in plain language: "Go for orbit! Starship will soon perform a short burn with a single Raptor engine to enter an ~275 km orbit of Earth." At 11.15pm, the company confirmed it: Starship "performs its orbital insertion burn and enters orbit of Earth for the second time". The first time was Flight 14, which launched on 28 September, according to Space.com.

The payload work was equally brisk. SpaceX posted at 11.27pm that Starship was "now deploying its payload of 26 @Starlink V3 satellites", a sequence it said would take about 42 minutes. At 12.06am UK time on Saturday, it declared the job done: "Payload deploy complete. All 26 @Starlink V3 satellites are in orbit." SpaceX's Flight 15 page says each V3 satellite is intended to add 1 terabit of capacity, with the full batch roughly equal to ten Starlink V2 Mini launches on Falcon 9. Three of the satellites carry cameras to inspect Ship 42's heat shield, which is one of the checks the company uses before it will even consider bringing a ship back over land.

How the catch unfolded tonight

By Saturday morning, SpaceX was still sounding cheerful. At 5.44am UK time it posted that "Starship and its heatshield are healthy" and that teams were monitoring systems "ahead of a planned return to launch site catch at Starbase ~22.5 hours after launch". A later update was shorter and no less confident: "Flight 15 Update: Starship coasting in orbit, still looking good for return to launch site today. Pad and tower systems are go for catch."

The final gate came in the early evening. At 7.18pm UK time, SpaceX said: "Teams have polled go to return Starship to the launch site at Starbase." Kate Tice, on the webcast, told viewers that stage two, the heat shield, flaps, structures, aero, guidance, navigation and control, and the tower had all voted go, as reported by Space.com's live updates.

From there the timeline tightened. At 8.16pm, SpaceX invited people to watch live, writing: "After being in orbit for more than 21 hours, Starship is preparing for its deorbit burn, reentry, and for the first time ship's return to launch site and catch at Starbase." Nine minutes later it posted: "Good deorbit burn. Starship is on course to reenter Earth’s atmosphere ahead of a planned catch at Starbase in ~1 hour." At 8.58pm: "Starship is reentering Earth’s atmosphere."

Space.com had put the catch at about 4.16pm Eastern, which is 9.16pm UK time. Spaceflight Now had it around 3.20pm Texas time, or 9.20pm here. SpaceX's own published timeline, counted from a 10.47pm UK liftoff, landed in the same few minutes. At 9.18pm, the company said Starship was "executing a banking maneuver and final approach as it returns to Starbase for a catch". Three minutes later came the line the whole flight had been built towards: "Mechazilla catches Starship! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on this incredible achievement!"

The webcast remains on the Flight 15 page and on SpaceX's account on X. A late ditch in the Gulf had been kept as a fallback if the approach looked off; in the event, the company went for the tower and made it.

Tonight could not deliver the full double recovery SpaceX had hoped for, but the ship catch is still a first: no Starship upper stage had ever been caught before. The booster is already in the drink, and the company says recovery teams were on site to make the area safe, with its environmental team looking out for debris coming ashore. The explanation for that abort is, for now, still an "early indication". A stainless-steel spaceship hanging from a pair of arms in Texas does not tidy that up, but it is quite a Saturday night.

Cover photo: Dirk Schuneman / Pexels.