SpaceX caught its Starship upper stage in the arms of its launch tower on Saturday, completing a return from orbit that no rocket builder had ever pulled off. Ship 42 fell out of the sky over Starbase, Texas, flipped upright, lit its landing burn and settled between the tower’s two mechanical arms, which closed around it at about 4:20 p.m. Eastern. The crowd watching from outside the fence line erupted as the ship came to rest, hanging in the arms it had left a day earlier.
“Mechazilla catches Starship!” SpaceX posted minutes later, congratulating its team. Mechazilla is the company’s nickname for the launch tower and its chopstick arms. SpaceX has caught the Super Heavy booster three times before, most recently in March 2025, but the upper stage, the part that actually goes to orbit, had always come back to a splashdown at sea. Catching it at the tower is the missing piece in SpaceX’s plan for a fully and rapidly reusable rocket: a ship that lands where it launched can, in principle, be inspected, refueled and flown again.
Flight 15 lifted off from Starbase at 5:47 p.m. Eastern on Friday, November 13. Ship 42 reached an orbit about 275 kilometers up, only the second time a Starship upper stage has reached orbit, and deployed all 26 of the new Starlink V3 satellites it was carrying. It then spent about 22 and a half hours in space, circling the Earth about 14 times, while flight controllers ran a series of health checks on the ship and its heat shield. On Saturday the team polled go for the return, the ship fired its engines to leave orbit, and it reentered the atmosphere over the Pacific before steering across northern Mexico and southern Texas toward the tower.
The one failure of the flight came on Friday. Super Heavy Booster 22 was also meant to be caught, in what would have been the first catch of the newest V3 booster. Instead, SpaceX said, the booster detected a guidance, navigation and control issue on its way back, aborted the catch on its own and diverted to a splashdown offshore in the Gulf, where it was lost. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said afterward that the booster was slightly low on fuel. Even with the booster gone, the ship’s catch closes the longest and most ambitious Starship flight yet, and it leaves SpaceX one booster catch away from recovering an entire orbital rocket for the first time.
Video: SpaceX
