By Joey Roulette
STARBASE, Texas, Nov 13 (Reuters) - SpaceX launched the 15th uncrewed flight of its next-generation Starship spacecraft from Texas on Friday on a mission the company hopes will be the first round-trip rocket voyage to orbit and back to the very spot where it left Earth.
If all goes as planned, Starship's upper-stage vessel will re-enter the atmosphere after nearly a day in orbit and return to its launch tower on Saturday for an engine-controlled touchdown assisted by the giant mechanical
arms of a pioneering catch-landing mechanism.
SpaceX planned to use the same return-flight and "chopstick"-arm technology to recover Starship's lower-stage booster rocket shortly after the two parts of the spacecraft separate within minutes of the launch.
Bringing the top portion of the spacecraft safely intact to the platform where it was launched to orbit would mark a breakthrough in SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ambition to produce a fully reusable rocket system.
The combined vehicle, consisting of the main Starship cargo-and-crew vessel perched atop its Super Heavy booster rocket and standing 40 stories high, roared off its launch pad at around from SpaceX's South Texas Starbase complex along the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville.
The flight marked the 15th test flight of Starship 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 SpaceX's satellite-connectivity business and a high-stakes test for a rocket ship still under development.
Musk's space and AI business views Starship as key to expanding its network of Starlink internet satellites and, in the future, deploying a swarm of orbital AI data-processing centers dubbed Starmind, as the company positions itself to become a high-tech infrastructure provider.
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 upper stage splashing down intact into the Pacific Ocean before bursting into flames.
For Friday's mission, the company was aiming for both the lower-stage Super Heavy and the upper-stage Starship to return to the spacecraft's Texas launch site for safe landing and recovery. Plans called for the orbital cruise vessel 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 (72-meter) 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 achieve a pace of weekly 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 paid to SpaceX since selecting the rocket ship in 2021 to serve as a lunar lander for its astronauts under the multibillion-dollar 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 objectives 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 critical 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; Writing and Additional Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jamie Freed and Rod Nickel)
