How do you catch both halves of a rocket?

SpaceX’s next Starship flight is set to end with two catches. About six and a half minutes after liftoff, the Super Heavy booster is meant to fly back to the launch tower at Starbase, Texas, and be caught by the tower’s arms. Then, about 22½ hours later, the ship on top is meant to come back from orbit and be caught by the same arms. Flight 15 is set for no earlier than Friday, November 13, 2026, in a 75-minute window that opens at 4:45 p.m. Central, “pending regulatory approval”. If both catches work, SpaceX says it will be the first full recovery of an orbital launch system.

▶ Try it yourself in Double Catch: run Flight 15’s mission clock from liftoff to the second catch and watch the ship’s ground track drift lap by lap.

The first catch has been done three times

Super Heavy has no landing legs. On Flights 5 (October 13, 2024), 7 (January 16, 2025) and 8 (March 6, 2025), the booster separated from the ship about two minutes into the flight, flipped, fired its engines to head back toward Starbase, and came down beside the tower on its engines until two mechanical arms, nicknamed the chopsticks, closed under it. On Flight 7, SpaceX says, the booster lit its landing burn less than 40 metres from its target. Flight 15 would be the first catch of the larger third-generation (V3) booster and the first at Starbase’s second pad, whose arms are shorter and electrically driven so they can move faster.

The ship is the hard part

The booster only goes up and out: on Flight 7 it rose to about 90 km and went a little over 60 km downrange before turning back. The ship goes all the way to orbit, about 275 km up at roughly 17,500 mph. On Flight 15 it is to drop off 26 Starlink V3 satellites, three of them carrying cameras to photograph its heat shield, and then stay up for most of a day. Coming home means shedding all that speed through a shield of ceramic tiles, steering with four flaps, then falling belly first, lighting three engines to flip upright and settling between the arms on one engine. The arms close on two catch fittings just below its forward flaps. No ship has been caught before.

Why it has to wait almost a day

SpaceX says the ship will coast for about 21 hours “until its orbit aligns with Starbase for a return”, about 14 orbits in all. The reason is that Earth turns underneath the orbit. A 275 km orbit takes 90 minutes a lap, and in 90 minutes Earth turns about 22.6°, plus a little more because Earth’s bulge slowly drags the orbit west. So the line on the map under the ship, its ground track, lands about 23° farther west on every lap. The ship launched heading northeast out over the Gulf, and it has to come home the same way, from over the Pacific and Mexico rather than down across the United States. A pass like that comes back over South Texas only after Earth has turned most of the way round: in our model, the 15th pass, about 22.4 hours after liftoff, comes within about 230 km of Starbase, close enough for the flaps to steer out the rest. SpaceX’s timeline has the ship’s deorbit burn at T+21:35:57 and its catch at T+22:32:34.

What can still change

Plenty. SpaceX’s page still said “pending regulatory approval” on November 10: the FAA had finished the environmental reviews for bringing the ship back to the launch site, but a licence for Flight 15 had not been posted. Along the way, go/no-go checks can send the ship to a planned splashdown off Hawaii or off Chile instead, and if anything is wrong with the ship or the tower at the end, it can be diverted into the Gulf. Launch dates slip often. The booster catch would still be the first for the new booster, and the ship catch the first ever.

How the model works

Every event time in Double Catch is from SpaceX’s Flight 15 event table, which SpaceX marks as approximate. The ground track is our own simple model: a circular 275 km orbit tilted 26.5° to the equator, a guess just above Starbase’s latitude (SpaceX has not published the tilt), with Earth turning under it and the orbit’s slow drift from Earth’s bulge. It shows why the ship waits, not exactly where it flies. The booster’s climb and boostback are a schematic, and the return path over Mexico and Texas is drawn after SpaceX’s description, not from a published trajectory. All the footage in the film is SpaceX’s; the ship-catch scenes are its computer animation, because it has not happened yet.