SpaceX’s upcoming Starship flight, set for Friday, will mark the first attempt to recover the spacecraft at its launch site in Texas instead of allowing it to land in the ocean. This operation is a crucial test in Elon Musk’s ambition to develop a fully reusable rocket system.
Standing at 124 meters tall, the Starship rocket is slated to take off at 5:45 p.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas. This will be the 15th flight of the Starship since 2023, and the second one to deploy a set of operational Starlink satellites. Consequently, this mission serves as both a revenue-generating venture for the satellite connectivity sector and a high-stakes evaluation of a rocket still under development.
As of Friday morning, SpaceX had not yet obtained a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Typically, the FAA issues licenses a day before previous Starship launches, but they did not provide an immediate comment on the situation.
Musk’s company views the next-generation Starship rocket as essential for enhancing its Starlink network with additional satellites and, in the future, to deploy a significant array of AI data-processing satellites known as Starmind, as the firm increasingly establishes itself as a major infrastructure player.
The last Starship launch occurred in September, when the rocket and its satellites successfully reached orbit for the first time, despite experiencing engine failures mid-flight. Although the mission was intended to last 10 hours, it concluded after approximately three hours with a successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
SpaceX astounded engineers, scientists and space enthusiasts by returning its heaviest rocket booster back to its launch pad intact. Beyond the technical marvel of the Starship rocket, reusability is expected to dramatically cut back on mission costs.
For the upcoming mission, SpaceX anticipates recovering both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage it uses for the launch. The upper stage, which functions as the spacecraft’s top half, is expected to return approximately 22 hours after liftoff. SpaceX has indicated that if all goes according to plan, this will be a “breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket.”
Preparing for Starship
SpaceX has successfully returned the 71-meter Super Heavy booster to its launchpad three times after deploying the Starship into space, with it landing vertically into large mechanical arms attached to the launch tower about 10 minutes post-launch. The most recent “tower catch” occurred in March 2025.
For this 15th mission, SpaceX will need to remove the Super Heavy booster from the launchpad to accommodate the Starship, which is anticipated to descend from space after completing 14 orbits around Earth. This sets the stage for the inaugural Starship catch to take place around 3:45 p.m. ET on Saturday.
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Musk has indicated that he aims to establish a weekly schedule of Starship launches by the first half of 2027, while SpaceX has suggested that it might start launching Starship from a new site in Florida by late 2026.
NASA has contributed approximately $3.2 billion to the development of Starship since selecting the rocket in 2021 to function as a moon lander for its astronauts as part of the multibillion-dollar Artemis program. SpaceX has invested at least $15 billion of its own capital into the rocket’s development.
Social media video recorded in Turks and Caicos shows debris streaking across the sky after the new Starship rocket broke up during a test flight.
NASA and SpaceX anticipate that Starship will land humans on the moon by 2028, although several significant testing milestones remain that experts and industry engineers believe may delay this timeline.
These milestones include showcasing complex fuel transfers between Starship “tanker” rockets in orbit — a vital process that will facilitate Starship’s travel beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is also in the process of developing a moon lander, named Blue Moon, for NASA under the Artemis program. Blue Moon is expected to join Starship and another spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule, in Earth’s orbit next year for Artemis III, which will serve as a docking test mission ahead of NASA’s planned moon landing missions starting with Artemis IV.