By Joey Roulette
BROWNSVILLE, Texas, Nov 13 (Reuters) - SpaceX's latest Starship flight planned for Friday will include its first attempt to catch the spacecraft on a return landing at its Texas launch site, rather than discarding the vehicle at sea, a key test of Elon Musk’s bid to produce a fully reusable rocket system.
The 407-foot-tall (124 m) Starship rocket was scheduled to launch at 4:45 p.m. CT (2245 GMT) from SpaceX's Starbase facilities in South Texas for its 15th flight since 2023 and the
second to carry a batch of operational Starlink satellites to orbit. That makes the mission both a revenue-generating endeavor for its satellite-connectivity business and a high-stakes test for a next-generation rocketship still under development.
SpaceX secured its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Starship flight hours before its planned liftoff, clearing the final regulatory hurdle for the mission.
Musk's colossal space and AI business views Starship as crucial to expanding its network of Starlink internet satellites and, in the future, deploying a vast swarm of AI data-processing satellites dubbed Starmind, as the company increasingly positions itself as a high-tech infrastructure giant.
SpaceX last launched Starship in September, taking the rocket and a payload of satellites to orbit for the first time despite some rocket engines shutting down mid-flight. That mission, planned to last 10 hours, ended after roughly three hours with an intact upper-stage splash-down in the Pacific Ocean.
For Friday's mission, the company expects that Starship's lower-stage Super Heavy booster rocket and its upper-stage crew and cargo vessel will return to the spacecraft's Texas launch site for safe landing and recovery. Plans call for the upper stage to touch down about 22 hours after launch. SpaceX has said it would be a "breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket" if that feat is achieved.
MAKING WAY FOR STARSHIP
SpaceX has previously returned the 236-foot-tall Super Heavy booster three times to its launchpad after sending Starship to space, with the booster flying itself back to Earth minutes after launch and gently descending upright into the grasp of a pair of large mechanical arms fixed to the launch tower. The last such "tower catch" was in March 2025.
For the 15th mission, SpaceX will need to move the Super Heavy booster off the launchpad to make way for Starship, which is expected to descend from space after completing 14 orbits around Earth. That sets up the debut Starship catch to occur at around 2:45 p.m. CT (2045 GMT) on Saturday.
Musk has said he expects to enter a weekly cadence of Starship launches by the first half of 2027, while SpaceX has said it could begin launching Starship from a new Florida launchpad by the end of 2026.
NASA has helped fund Starship's development with roughly $3.2 billion delivered to SpaceX since selecting the rocket in 2021 to serve as a moon lander for its astronauts under the multibillion-dollar US Artemis moon program. SpaceX has put at least $15 billion of its own funds into the rocket's development.
NASA and SpaceX expect Starship to land humans on the moon by 2028, though several major testing milestones remain that analysts and industry engineers believe will push that timeline back. Those milestones include demonstrating complex fuel transfers between Starship "tanker" rockets in orbit, a key process that will enable Starship to travel beyond Earth's orbit to the moon.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is also developing a moon lander, Blue Moon, for NASA under the Artemis program. Blue Moon is poised to join Starship and another spacecraft, NASA's Orion capsule, in Earth's orbit next year for Artemis III, a docking test mission before NASA's planned moon landing missions begin with Artemis IV.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Jamie Freed)
