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Starship may have just made history, but it still has work to do to be fully operational.
The megarocket launched on its 15th test flight Friday (November 13), aiming to achieve a dramatic and unprecedented double. EspaceX I wanted to bring both Spacecraft elements – its Super Heavy booster and the ship’s upper stage – towards the launch pad at its Starbase site in Texas to be caught by the tower’s “wand” arms.
This didn’t happen with Super Heavy; the booster diverted to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico Friday evening after receiving a low fuel alarm. But The ship returned home successfullynestled in the arms of the tower in a gentle and unprecedented embrace Saturday afternoon (November 14), 22.5 hours after liftoff.
SpaceX has caught Super Heavy on three test flights to date. But he had never caught a ship before; in fact, he had never tried it before Saturday. It is more difficult and riskier to catch Ship; the upper stage flies much higher and faster than the Super Heavy, so its return journey is much more complex.
So Saturday was a very big day for the company.
“It was the holy grail of spaceflight, diving through fire only to be ripped out of the air by steel,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said during the company’s landing webcast Saturday. “We caught a spaceship and now everything changes.”
THE Flight 15 The mission plan gave us a glimpse of the future: Dual capture will be the norm on operational Starship missions, as this recovery strategy will enable rapid inspection, refurbishment and reflight of the megarocket, according to SpaceX.
And the company is indeed planning a rapid recovery. Elon Musk said SpaceX is aiming for 10,000 Starship launches per year by 2030, which equates to more than one liftoff every hour on average.
Why such a staggering pace? Because SpaceX plans to build megaconstellations far larger than anything surrounding Earth today. For example, it wants its next-generation Starlink V3 broadband network to be made up of 100,000 satellites. And its planned Starmind AI data center constellation will be 10 times larger than that, with a million spaceshipsif everything goes as planned.
For perspective: SpaceX’s current generation Starlink network in low earth orbit (LEO), by far the largest constellation ever assembled, currently has around 11,000 members.
Of course, rocket recovery is only part of the reuse equation; there is also refurbishment and revolving. And that brings us back to the “work remaining to be done” discussion, as SpaceX has yet to demonstrate a rapid reflight with Super Heavy or Ship.
The company has returned Super Heavy vehicles twice. Booster 14 initially launched on Flight 7 in January 2025, then took off again on Flight 9 in May of the same year. Booster 15 flew on Flight 8 and Flight 11which took off in March 2025 and October 2025 respectively.
Several months separate each of these Super Heavy reflights. And SpaceX has yet to re-use a ship, as it hadn’t captured one on a mission until Saturday.
That could soon change: Before Flight 15 took off, Musk said the company wanted to reuse its two Starship stages. This option may still be on the table for the Flight 15 ship.
And we should expect full reuse to be a priority on Starship test flights in the long term, with SpaceX striving for shorter and shorter turnaround times – perhaps until an hourly cadence is in sight, if that goal is indeed achievable.
Over the next few years, most Starship launches will likely be devoted to building the Starlink V3 and Starmind megaconstellations. But the rocket will also carry people into deep space, if all goes according to plan, which will require checking another set of boxes.
NASA selected Ship to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis Programwhich aims to establish a base near the lunar south pole by around 2032. Current plans call for the ship to land astronauts in this region for the first time in the world. Artemis IV mission, whose flight is planned for 2028.
SpaceX must install a crew cabin and life support system in the ship to achieve this. The company is currently working on it and has made considerable progress, according to NASA. Last month, a presentation of the agency reported that SpaceX was on track to complete construction of “Cabin 1,” a full-scale ground-based prototype of the ship’s crew cabin, by the end of the year.
There is, however, another hurdle to overcome. For all deep space missions, the craft will need to refuel after launch, in a “depot” that SpaceX will install in Earth orbit. (Launching a ship with full tanks is not an option, as it would be incredibly heavy in this case.)
The depot will be filled with “tanker” variants of the Ship. It’s not clear how many tanker visits will be required for each ship’s deep space mission; outside experts have put forward numbers as high as 22, while Elon Musk has cited six to eight as a likely range.
Whatever the actual number, Ship will need to demonstrate proficiency in off-Earth resupply, something it has yet to do. And it’s not just a walk-in: Ship engines run on liquid oxygen and liquid methane, so the thrusters must be kept extremely cold throughout the process.
We’ll likely see the first refueling test relatively soon, as time is running out for SpaceX. If the company fails to prepare the ship for the Artemis IV moon landing in 2028, NASA could opt for another private lander: that of Blue Origin. Blue Moonwhich the agency also subcontracted for the Artemis missions.
All of this is to say that while Flight 15 was a big success for Starship and SpaceX, there’s still a lot of work to be done — and a lot for space fans to watch for in the weeks and months to come.
