On Saturday, November 14, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft successfully returned after a 22.5-hour orbital flight and made its first direct landing on the mechanical manipulators of the launch tower at the Starbase site in Texas.
On Saturday, November 14, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft successfully returned after a 22.5-hour orbital flight and made its first direct landing on the mechanical manipulators of the launch tower at the Starbase site in Texas.
According to Reuters, the 15th test flight of the 124-meter rocket system began on Friday at 4:47 p.m. local time. The upper stage (the 52-meter craft itself) made 14 revolutions around the Earth at an altitude of about 260 km and put 26 Starlink satellites into orbit.
During re-entry at a speed of about 27,350 km/h, the spacecraft turned on its engines to go into a vertical position and locked onto the Mechazilla tower manipulators, known as “chopsticks.” Before capture, engineers conducted a thorough assessment of the ship’s condition in orbit — in the event of the slightest deviations, it would be directed into the ocean.
"It was the same 'missing link', the 'Holy Grail' of spaceflight," SpaceX mission representative Dan Huot commented on the landing.
At the same time, the company failed to implement its plan to fully restore both stages of the rocket in a single mission. A few minutes after launch, the Super Heavy booster's automatic flight termination system was triggered: it was redirected into the ocean, where it exploded.
Some phone videos I took from the tower https://t.co/kxiSkIvoHQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2026
Elon Musk explained on Twitter that the booster was “a little low on fuel,” but noted that after landing, “Ship #42 looks great” and he wants to hug it. SpaceX has successfully caught the Super Heavy booster three times before, but this is the first time the upper stage, which first went into orbit in September, has been returned in this way.
For SpaceX, which is set to go public in early 2026, creating a fully reusable system is critical to lowering launch costs, deploying the Starlink network, putting data centers in orbit, and future missions to the moon and Mars. However, engineers still need to improve the heat shield: the hundreds of hexagonal tiles that protect the hull from overheating still need to be repaired between flights.
The company has already spent more than $15 billion on the development of Starship, with another $3.2 billion allocated by NASA as part of a contract worth more than $4 billion from 2021. The success of the program directly affects the US's lunar plans in the race with China, which plans to land taikonauts on the Moon by 2030.
According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the agency is under schedule pressure: the Artemis III mission is scheduled for the summer of 2027, and astronauts are scheduled to land on the moon's surface in 2028. NASA is also counting on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin lander for this program, but its flights were postponed until early 2027 due to the explosion of the New Glenn rocket and the destruction of the launch pad in Florida earlier this year.
