Musk’s SpaceX writes rocket history as Starship lands in tower’s arms

SpaceX caught the upper stage of its Starship rocket with the mechanical arms of its launch tower on Saturday, the first time the company has recovered the vehicle after a flight and a major step toward Elon Musk’s goal of a fully reusable rocket.

The stage, known as Ship 42, settled into the tower’s “chopstick” arms at the company’s South Texas launch site at 4:20 p.m. EST (2120 GMT). It had lifted off roughly 22-1/2 hours earlier on Starship’s 15th test flight.

“We caught a Starship, and now everything changes,” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said on the company’s landing webcast.

SpaceX had aimed to catch both of Starship’s stages on the same mission, which would have been the first complete recovery of an orbital rocket. That plan fell apart minutes after Friday’s launch, when the Super Heavy booster called off its tower catch and diverted to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6-1/2 minutes into the flight. The booster caught fire after hitting the water.

Musk said the booster was slightly low on fuel and had a guidance problem, and that its software aborted the catch on its own. He added that a failed attempt could have destroyed the tower and set the program back two to three months.

Upper stage the harder target

The company has caught Super Heavy boosters three times before, most recently in March 2025. It had never tried with the ship, which flies higher and faster and must survive a fiery reentry from orbit at roughly 17,000 miles per hour.

On this flight the ship circled Earth about 14 times and released 26 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink V3 internet satellites. Some of those satellites photographed the ship’s heat shield, and engineers judged it healthy enough to attempt the return to Texas.

The ship reached orbit for the first time only on Flight 14 in late September. On Saturday it fell belly-first through the atmosphere, flipped upright and fired its engines to slow into the tower’s grip.

Upper stages of orbital rockets are normally discarded after a single use, including on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters returned from orbit and flew again, but they glided to runway landings rather than flying back to the launch pad.

Booster loss a ‘setback’

Malcolm Macdonald, president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, called the ship recovery an important achievement despite the lost booster. “Not recovering the first stage is a setback,” he said.

Starship has yet to show it can be inspected, refurbished and flown again quickly, the turnaround that would make reuse pay off. SpaceX is expected to attempt another double catch on its next flight.

Moon program watching

NASA welcomed the result. The agency is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to develop Starship as a lunar lander for its Artemis program.

NASA’s next mission, Artemis III, will stay in Earth orbit while astronauts practise docking with Starship and Blue Origin’s rival Blue Moon lander. The first crewed moon landing since the Apollo era, Artemis IV, is targeted for as soon as 2028.

SpaceX also needs a rapidly reusable Starship to build out its Starlink V3 constellation, which could eventually number 100,000 satellites, along with Musk’s proposed orbital AI data-center network.

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