Starship Flight 15: Catching Both Stages

On Sunday the twenty-fifth of October, at Starbase in South Texas, thirty-three engines lit at once on a booster bolted to the ground. Fifteen seconds. A wall of steam.

Bolted down, so it's going nowhere. That's a deliberately frustrating way to run a rocket.

That's the point. Full duration, all thirty-three, no flight. SpaceX called it a full duration static fire for the booster preparing for Flight fifteen. Three days later they fired the upper stage too.

And Flight fifteen is... when?

Tentatively November. No date announced. But Elon Musk has said this flight will attempt something nobody has ever done: catch the UPPER stage with the tower arms.

Hang on. They already catch boosters. I've seen the chopsticks grab one.

Booster's the easy half. It never leaves the neighbourhood. The ship goes to space, comes back through reentry at full heating, has to slow itself, and then fly precisely back to the launch site and hover into two metal arms.

Precisely being the operative word. What happens if it's off by, what, ten metres?

That's the part nobody's demonstrated. Previously the ship has done controlled descents into the ocean. Aiming at the tower is a different problem entirely.

So why bother? The ocean works.

Because a ship that splashes down is wet. Seawater, a boat trip, inspections. One that lands on the tower you can look at straight away: engines, heat shield, everything, while it's still warm.

Right, and reusing it is the whole business model. You can't fly to Mars if every spaceship is single-use.

That's the thread. And this series has been circling it for weeks. Mars needs refuelling in orbit, and refuelling means many launches, cheap, fast.

Okay, but is Starship actually at that point? Last I heard these things kept blowing up.

Not anymore. On the twenty-eighth of September, Flight fourteen reached orbit for the first time and deployed twenty-six Starlink V-three satellites. First real payload Starship has ever delivered.

First time in orbit. That's... later than I'd have guessed, honestly.

Deliberately. For the first thirteen flights SpaceX put the upper stage on what they call a passively safe trajectory: not quite enough speed to stay up. If control was lost, it came down where they'd planned anyway.

So all those spectacular test flights were technically falling the whole time.

Falling very far, very fast. And Flight fourteen wasn't clean either. A Raptor engine on the upper stage shut down early during ascent, so they cut a ten-hour mission down to about three.

An engine quit and they still made orbit and came home? That's either very good or slightly worrying.

Both, probably. It reentered under control and splashed down in the Pacific.

So who actually has to say yes before November? The FAA, presumably, and they're not famous for speed.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, addressed that on an earnings call on the twentieth of October. She said they've had significant constructive engagement with the FAA, and expect the Flight fifteen licence to cover return to launch site and tower catch for BOTH stages.

Expect. Not have.

Expect. That's her word, and it's worth holding onto.

What's riding on this beyond bragging rights, though? Does NASA care?

Enormously. On the twenty-third of October, Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at Kennedy Space Center and laid out an accelerated plan. Artemis three now sends four astronauts to LOW EARTH ORBIT next year, to dock with test landers.

Not the Moon? Artemis three was supposed to be the landing.

Redefined. The landing moves to Artemis four, targeted 2028. And NASA hasn't decided whose lander goes first: SpaceX's Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon. It depends on readiness.

So every test flight is effectively an audition.

With a twist in the new plan. Under the revised operations, Starship would wait in Earth orbit, dock with Orion there, and then push Orion to the Moon itself. NASA is modifying Orion so Starship can shove it.

NASA's own capsule hitching a ride. That's a big shift in who's driving.

And every bit of it depends on Starship being routinely reusable. Which is the thing Flight fifteen is testing.

Give me the honest odds, then. Do they catch the ship?

Genuinely unknown. They've never tried. SpaceX hasn't announced a date, hasn't published the propulsion data, and the licence isn't confirmed in public.

What's your guess?

I'd say they fly in November and I would not bet money on the ship landing in the arms first try. The booster, yes. The ship, ask me after.

And if it works, what changes the next morning?

Then they've got a spacecraft they can look at, fix, and fly again. Everything about Mars after that is arithmetic.

Which is a nicer problem than the one they've got now.