Starship Reaches Orbit as Booster Catch Is Aborted

SpaceX's Starship reached orbit on Friday in the most ambitious test flight the company has ever attempted, but the mission's headline goal — catching both stages of the giant rocket in a single flight — slipped away within minutes of liftoff, when controllers diverted the Super Heavy booster to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead of bringing it back to the launch tower. The upper stage, Ship 42, is still flying, and if it comes home as planned on Saturday afternoon, it will attempt something no spacecraft has ever done: be caught out of the sky by a tower after a full trip to orbit.

File photo: a SpaceX Starship lifts off from Starbase, Texas, during an earlier test flight. Flight 15 launched from the same site on Friday, November 13, 2026.

A Liftoff on Schedule

The 407-foot Starship stack lifted off from Orbital Launch Pad 2 at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas at about 4:47 p.m. Central time on Friday, November 13, 2026. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster fired, pushing the tallest and most powerful rocket ever flown off the pad in a column of flame and smoke visible for miles along the Gulf Coast.

About two and a half minutes into the flight, the two stages separated in the maneuver known as hot-staging, with the upper stage's engines igniting while still attached to the booster. Ship 42 then fired its engines for the burn that would carry it into orbit, while the booster turned back toward the Texas coast for its planned return to the launch site.

The launch came on a chaotic day for American aviation. Hours earlier, the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered a nationwide halt to flight departures after a telecommunications failure hit air traffic control centers across the country. The rocket launch was unaffected by the unrelated failure and went ahead on schedule.

Flight 15 is the fifteenth test flight of the Starship system and the fourth flight of the upgraded Version 3 vehicle. It is only the second Starship mission ever to reach orbit, after Flight 14 did so on September 28, and by far the longest flight the program has attempted, with the ship scheduled to spend more than 22 hours in space before coming home.

The Booster Catch That Wasn't

The first half of SpaceX's plan unraveled about six and a half minutes after liftoff. The Super Heavy booster, known as Booster 22, was supposed to fly back to Starbase and be caught in midair by the launch tower's giant mechanical arms, nicknamed the chopsticks. Instead, controllers diverted it to an offshore splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX has not said what triggered the abort. Reporting from the launch site said a technical issue led the company to call off the catch over safety concerns, and observers at Starbase heard the sonic boom and saw the fiery plunge as the booster came down minutes after launch. SpaceX later posted photos captioned "Landing burn and splashdown for Super Heavy Booster 22," but the company has not said why the booster was diverted or whether it will be recovered.

The missed catch was a setback for the newest version of the rocket. Booster 22 was the first Version 3 Super Heavy ever to attempt a tower catch, and the flight was designed to be the first to recover both stages of an orbital rocket in a single mission. SpaceX has caught a Super Heavy booster three times before, on Flights 5, 7 and 8, with the first catch coming in October 2024, but each of those was an earlier version of the vehicle.

The booster was the expendable half of the plan this time, and its loss does not end the mission. SpaceX builds its flight plans with ocean splashdowns as the fallback for both stages, and the company's engineers will study the booster's final minutes of data as they prepare the next attempt.

File photo: a Starship upper stage in orbit above Earth during an earlier test flight. Ship 42 reached orbit on Friday and is due to attempt a tower catch on Saturday afternoon.

Ship 42's Long Night in Orbit

While the booster was coming down in the Gulf, Ship 42 kept climbing. About 27 minutes after launch, the ship reached low Earth orbit at an altitude of roughly 275 kilometers, or about 170 miles, above the planet — only the second time a Starship upper stage has ever made it to orbit.

Shortly afterward, the ship began the job it had carried into space. Over the course of about an hour, it released all 26 Starlink V3 satellites it was carrying, and by 6:06 p.m. Central time SpaceX confirmed that every satellite had deployed and made contact. It was the second time a Starship has delivered satellites to orbit, and the payload matters: each V3 satellite adds a terabit per second of capacity to the Starlink constellation, and SpaceX says the 26 satellites on this flight carry about as much capacity as ten Falcon 9 launches of the previous generation of satellites. Three of the satellites carry cameras to scan the ship's heat shield during the flight and send the imagery back to operators on the ground.

SpaceX said the ship and its heat shield were healthy as it settled into its long coast around Earth. The ship is expected to circle the planet about 14 times over more than 22 hours, passing through a series of checkpoints that flight controllers will use to judge whether it is fit to come home.

If all systems remain healthy, the plan calls for the ship to fire a single Raptor engine to leave orbit, reenter the atmosphere over the Pacific, glide across northern Mexico and southern Texas, and be caught by the same tower's arms at about 3:19 p.m. Central time on Saturday, roughly 22 and a half hours after liftoff. SpaceX has set several checkpoints along the way, and if a problem appears the ship can be sent to an early splashdown in the Pacific instead. There are pre-cleared ocean splashdown zones near Hawaii and off the coast of Chile, and another in the Gulf of Mexico that the company could use if something goes wrong during the final approach.

File photo: a Super Heavy booster is caught by the launch tower's mechanical arms during an earlier test flight. SpaceX has caught a booster three times before; Flight 15's booster catch was called off.

What This Means

Flight 15 was always two missions in one, and the results so far split the difference. The booster catch failed, but the ship reached orbit and delivered its payload, and the hardest part of the flight is still ahead.

For SpaceX, the stakes go beyond a single test. The entire Starship program is built on the idea that both stages of the rocket can be caught, refueled and flown again quickly, like an airplane rather than a disposable firework. That rapid reuse is what the company says will make spaceflight dramatically cheaper and more frequent, and it is the reason NASA has chosen Starship as the vehicle that will land American astronauts on the Moon under the Artemis program. Every booster catch is a step toward proving the system works; every missed catch is a reminder of how much of the flight is still unforgiving.

The booster failure also shows how much of the risk in the program now sits in the final minutes of a flight. The rocket's ascent, staging and orbital insertion all worked as planned. The problem came during the return, when the booster had to fly itself back to a precise point in the sky and be grabbed by a tower — a maneuver with no margin for a fault that controllers are not willing to accept.

For the satellite business, the flight was already a success. Twenty-six V3 satellites in a single launch, each carrying far more capacity than the satellites they replace, is the kind of step change in deployment speed that SpaceX has been building toward since it first put a Starlink payload on Starship in September.

What Happens Next

All eyes are now on Saturday afternoon. If Ship 42 is cleared through its checkpoints and attempts the tower catch, it would be the first time any spacecraft has been caught after returning from orbit, and the first time every part of an orbital rocket has been recovered intact. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has previously put the odds of the ship catch at roughly 50 to 60 percent, and the company's own timeline has always treated it as conditional on the health of the vehicle.

Beyond this flight, SpaceX is preparing to take Starship to Florida, where facilities at Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A are undergoing final testing for a first East Coast launch the company hopes to attempt by the end of the year.