How do you catch both halves of a rocket?

Flight 15 is set to launch from Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas, no earlier than Friday, November 13, 2026, in a 75-minute window that opens at 4:45 p.m. Central (5:45 p.m. Eastern), “pending regulatory approval”, according to SpaceX’s mission page. SpaceX’s live webcast starts about 30 minutes before liftoff on its website and on X, and it plans to keep showing views through the ship catch, the next afternoon. If it lifts off at the start of the window, the booster catch comes at about 4:51 p.m. Friday and the ship catch at about 3:17 p.m. Saturday, Central time.

Dates slip often, and on November 10 the FAA had finished the environmental reviews for bringing the ship back to the launch site but had not posted a licence for this flight. Check SpaceX’s page before you plan around it.

Super Heavy has no landing legs. Instead:

1. Separate

   At T+2:21 the ship lights its own engines while still attached and pushes away from the booster (hot staging).

2. Fly back

   The booster flips and fires its engines to cancel its speed away from the coast and head back toward Starbase. On Flight 7 it rose to about 90 km and went a little over 60 km downrange first.

3. Land on the arms

   It lights its landing burn at about T+6:10, comes down beside the tower on its engines, and the two arms (the “chopsticks”) close under its catch points at about T+6:35.

This has worked three times: on Flights 5 (October 13, 2024), 7 (January 16, 2025) and 8 (March 6, 2025). Flight 15 would be the first catch of the third-generation (V3) booster, whose three larger grid fins carry the catch point, and the first at Pad 2, whose arms are shorter and electrically driven so they can track the booster faster.

Because Earth turns underneath it. A 275 km orbit takes about 90 minutes a lap. In 90 minutes Earth turns about 22.6°, and Earth’s equatorial bulge drags the orbit itself about another half a degree west, so the ship’s ground track, the line on the map directly under it, lands about 23° farther west each lap.

The ship launched heading northeast over the Gulf, and it has to come home the same way: entering over the Pacific and flying across northern Mexico and South Texas, not down across the United States. A pass like that comes back over Starbase only once Earth has turned most of the way round. SpaceX says the ship coasts “~21 hours until its orbit aligns with Starbase for a return”, about 14 orbits in all. In our simple model, the 15th pass, about 22.4 hours after liftoff, comes within about 230 km of Starbase, close enough for the ship’s flaps to steer out the rest during entry. The long coast also leaves time to photograph the heat shield from Starlink satellites and to run go/no-go checks, with planned bail-out splashdowns off Hawaii and off Chile.

1. Deorbit

   At T+21:35:57 a single engine fires to slow the ship enough to fall back in.

2. Reenter

   At about T+22:10 it hits the air over the Pacific, thousands of kilometres from Starbase, belly first behind its tile heat shield, and steers with four flaps through a series of banking turns over sparsely populated parts of northern Mexico and South Texas. People in Cameron County may hear sonic booms.

3. Flip

   Falling belly first toward the tower, it lights its three sea-level Raptor engines and flips upright at T+22:32:18, then drops to two engines to move between the arms and to one as it nears a hover.

4. Catch

   The arms close on two catch fittings just below its forward flaps at about T+22:32:34, and the last engine shuts down when the ship registers contact.

No ship has been caught before. If the ship or the tower is not healthy, the ship can be sent to a splashdown in the Gulf instead.

Legs are weight that has to be carried all the way up and back. A tower that does the catching stays on the ground, and a stage caught on the tower can be set straight back on the launch mount. SpaceX calls full and rapid reuse the key to flying rockets more like airliners: on Flight 15, it says, the 26 Starlink V3 satellites, each adding 1 terabit per second of capacity, equal about ten Falcon 9 Starlink launches. Claims about future cost per kilogram are targets, not prices.

1. 1 See

   Open Double Catch and press Booster catch: the side view shows the booster’s trip out and back, and the tower view the arms closing at T+6:35.

2. 2 Change

   Press Lap 8, then drag the mission clock on: each lap’s track lands about 23° west of the last, and the bars show how close each lap’s northbound pass comes to Starbase.

3. 3 Understand

   Press Deorbit burn and Ship catch, and move Liftoff time to see when each event would happen in Central time.

Double Catch uses SpaceX’s published event times, which SpaceX marks as approximate. Its ground track is a simple model of our own: a circular 275 km orbit tilted 26.5° to the equator (an assumption just above Starbase’s latitude; SpaceX has not published the tilt), with Earth’s rotation and the orbit’s drift from Earth’s bulge. It explains why the ship waits, not exactly where it flies. The booster’s path is a schematic, and the return over Mexico and Texas is drawn after SpaceX’s description, not from a published trajectory.

The ship-catch scenes in the film are SpaceX’s computer animation, labelled as such, because the catch has not happened yet. This guide will be out of date the moment Flight 15 flies.