We’ll have to wait a bit longer for a highly anticipated Starship milestone, it appears.
On Aug. 4, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company aimed to attempt the first-ever catch of Starship’s upper stage on the vehicle’s next test flight, which is tentatively targeted for late August.
But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards anymore. “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months,” Musk said early this morning (Aug. 20) via X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.
SpaceX has high hopes for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.
Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Rapid reuse will be enabled by landings directly on the launch mount, with the aid of the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms.
SpaceX has already pulled off such chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of Starship’s 13 suborbital test flights to date. And one of those missions featured a used Super Heavy: The same booster flew on Flight 7 and Flight 9.
SpaceX has not yet tried to catch Ship, however, because it’s a tougher ask: The upper stage comes back down to Earth from much greater heights, and at much higher speeds, than Super Heavy.
But the company has made progress toward this goal recently. For example, on Flight 13, which launched on July 24, Ship survived reentry through Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in its target zone, a patch of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.
The vehicle even remained intact after toppling over, a feat none of its predecessors had pulled off. SpaceX subsequently towed Ship to Christmas Island and will study it in depth to inform future iterations of the vehicle.
This encouraging performance led to optimism about a coming tower-catch try for Ship.
“I’d say things look very good, and that’s why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month,” Musk said on Aug. 4, during SpaceX’s first call with investors as a public company.
As that quote indicates, however, a Ship tower catch is not entirely up to SpaceX. It also requires approval from regulators — specifically, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. It’s possible that such approval has not yet been secured for Flight 14, and that’s why the timeline has shifted.
After all, Musk has continued to voice confidence in Ship’s abilities.
“If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught,” he added in this morning’s X post. “First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”
Even without a Ship catch attempt, Flight 14 should still feature some exciting action. During the earnings call, Musk said that Starship will go orbital on Flight 14, something it has never done before.
