Starship Flight 15 (Nov. 13, 2026): Launch Time, Double Catch, How to Watch and What to Expect

On Friday, November 13, SpaceX plans to try something no rocket company has ever pulled off: launch an orbital rocket and then catch both of its stages back at the launch pad. The Super Heavy booster is supposed to return to the tower at Starbase, Texas, about six and a half minutes after liftoff. The Starship upper stage is supposed to follow it the next afternoon, after roughly 14 trips around the planet, by dropping out of the sky over northern Mexico and South Texas and settling into the same pair of giant mechanical arms.

If it works, Starship Flight 15 would be the first time a whole orbital launch system has come home in one piece, ready to be flown again. If something looks wrong along the way, SpaceX says the ship will simply splash down in the ocean instead. Either way, it is one of the most closely watched launches of the year.

The short version: the 75-minute launch window opens at 4:45 p.m. Central time (2:45 p.m. Pacific, 5:45 p.m. Eastern) on Friday, November 13, 2026, pending regulatory approval. The free webcast starts about 30 minutes before liftoff on SpaceX’s website and on X. The booster catch would come at about T+6:35, and the first-ever ship catch at about T+22:32, which would be Saturday afternoon in Texas.

Starship Flight 15 launch date and time

SpaceX’s mission page lists the window as 4:45 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. CT on Friday, November 13. That works out to 2:45 to 4:00 p.m. PT, 3:45 to 5:00 p.m. MT, 5:45 to 7:00 p.m. ET and 22:45 to 00:00 UTC. As of Tuesday, November 10, the company still described the launch as "pending regulatory approval" (SpaceX).

Starship dates slip often. Local reporting lists backup opportunities from November 14 through November 19, each with the same 4:45 p.m. CT opening (MyRGV). If the ship catch does happen on schedule after a window-opening launch, it would come at roughly 3:17 p.m. CT on Saturday, November 14, or 1:17 p.m. PT. Treat that as a rough target, because it depends on the exact liftoff time and on several go or no-go decisions along the way.

What SpaceX is trying to do on Flight 15

Flight 15 has three big jobs, and each would be a first in its own way.

Catch the new Super Heavy booster

SpaceX has caught a Super Heavy booster with the tower’s "chopstick" arms three times before, starting on October 13, 2024, and two of those caught boosters later flew again. But all three were the older first-generation design. Flight 15 is the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster, the upgraded version that debuted in May (SpaceX). This flight’s booster is B22, and the tower is the newer one at Pad 2, whose arms are shorter and now driven by electric actuators instead of hydraulics so they can move faster (SpaceX).

Catch the Starship upper stage for the first time

This is the headline. No Starship upper stage has ever come back to the launch site. Every previous flight ended with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific or, for early test vehicles, an explosion. Coming home is much harder for the ship than for the booster: it is returning from orbit at roughly 17,500 mph, not from a short hop, and it has to survive the full heat of reentry before it can line up with the tower. The ship on this flight is S42.

Deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites

Starship is also carrying real cargo. It will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, each of which SpaceX says adds 1 terabit per second of capacity to the network. The company says the full load is equal to about 10 Falcon 9 launches of the current Starlink V2 Mini satellites. Three of the 26 have extra cameras so they can photograph Starship’s heatshield after they separate, giving engineers a look at the tiles before they decide whether to bring the ship home (SpaceX).

Coming home is much harder for the ship than for the booster: it is returning from orbit at roughly 17,500 mph, not from a short hop.

Starship Flight 15 timeline, from liftoff to ship catch

These are SpaceX’s published mission times, counted from liftoff. All of them are approximate, and the later steps only happen if the earlier checks pass.

T+0:00:58, Max Q. The rocket passes through the moment of peak aerodynamic stress as it climbs over the Gulf.

T+0:02:21, hot staging. Starship lights its six Raptor engines while still attached to the booster and pushes itself free.

T+0:02:26 to T+0:03:02, boostback. Super Heavy flips around and fires its engines to head back toward Starbase.

T+0:06:10 to T+0:06:35, booster catch. The booster lights its landing engines, slows over the pad and, if all goes well, is caught by the tower arms.

T+0:26:10, orbit. After a short coast on a "passively safe" suborbital path, a single Raptor engine fires for about 20 seconds to put Starship into orbit, at an altitude of about 275 km (171 miles).

T+0:35:01 to T+1:17:40, satellite deployment. The 26 Starlink V3 satellites are pushed out one after another.

T+1:27:46, T+7:15:35 and T+20:41:55, return checks. Flight controllers decide whether to keep going or bring Starship down early in pre-cleared ocean zones near Hawaii or off Chile.

T+21:35:57, deorbit burn. If Starship is cleared to come home, one engine fires for about 10 seconds to drop it out of orbit.

T+22:10:46, entry. The ship hits the upper atmosphere over the Pacific, thousands of kilometers from Texas.

T+22:32:16 to T+22:32:34, landing burn and ship catch. Starship flips upright, steps down from three engines to two to one, slides between the tower arms and shuts down once they close on it (SpaceX).

How Starship comes home: the route over Mexico and Texas

Until now, SpaceX has kept Starship’s reentries over empty ocean on purpose. To reach Starbase, the ship has to fly over people. In a November 7 update, the company said Starship will use its four flaps to make a series of small turns that keep it over sparsely populated parts of northern Mexico and southern Texas, weave around the larger cities of the Rio Grande Valley, pass north of South Padre Island, swing out over the Gulf and then make a final turn south toward the pad (SpaceX).

SpaceX points out that this is not new territory for spacecraft in general. Space Shuttle orbiters crossed large parts of the United States, Mexico and Central America on the way to their runways for 30 years, and Russian Soyuz and Chinese Shenzhou capsules come down over land every time. The company also says it has spent earlier flights pushing Starship harder than a normal return would, including deliberately removing dozens of heatshield tiles and flying maneuvers that put extra heat and load on the flaps, to build a margin of safety.

The ship also has ways out. During reentry, controllers can end the flight early by deliberately tumbling Starship so it breaks up high in the atmosphere before it reaches land, and there is a late option to steer it into the Gulf instead of the tower if something goes wrong with the ship or the tower after reentry.

Expect a sonic boom. SpaceX says people in Cameron County and nearby may hear one or more sonic booms as Starship approaches. They sound like a short clap of thunder, are not a health risk, and how loud they seem depends on the weather.

How we got here

The double catch is the end of a long run of test flights. Starship first flew in April 2023, and the booster catch that made the chopstick arms famous came on Flight 5, on October 13, 2024. SpaceX repeated it on Flight 7 in January 2025 and Flight 8 in March 2025, then reflew one of those caught boosters on Flight 9 in May 2025 and another on Flight 11 in October 2025.

This year brought the third-generation rocket. Flight 12, on May 22, 2026, was the first flight of the V3 booster and ship, the new Raptor 3 engines and the second pad at Starbase. The ship reached space and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, but the booster could not light all of its engines for the trip back and hit the Gulf hard (SpaceX). Flight 13, on July 24, deployed the first 20 Starlink V3 satellites on a suborbital path, relit a Raptor in space, and ended with a soft splashdown that left the ship floating intact in the Indian Ocean (SpaceX).

Flight 14, on September 28, finally went to orbit. It lost one engine on the booster and one on the ship during the climb, but the ship made up the difference by burning its other engines longer, reached orbit for the first time, and deployed all 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Because of the engine problem, controllers brought it down early, after about three hours instead of the planned ten, to an on-target splashdown in the northern Pacific (SpaceX; MyRGV). That booster was not caught either; it flew a deliberately demanding test profile and splashed down in the Gulf.

So the record going into Flight 15 is mixed in an interesting way: no V3 booster has yet made it back to the tower, and the ship has never tried. SpaceX is asking both to do it on the same flight.

The heatshield is the big question

Starship’s belly is covered in thousands of hexagonal heat-resistant tiles. Losing a few in the wrong place has been a recurring problem on earlier flights, and a ship that is going to be caught and flown again cannot come home scorched. For Flight 15, SpaceX says it has added extra retention hardware on the tiles judged most likely to come loose during ascent, sealed places where hot plasma could sneak behind them, and fitted a large part of the heatshield with a curved tile design that cuts heating in the gaps between tiles (SpaceX).

That is why the three camera-carrying Starlink satellites matter. Their photos are one of several sources that flight controllers will use during the long coast to decide whether the ship is healthy enough to aim at Texas.

Recovering an entire orbital launch system has never been done, and Starship has always been designed to change that. (SpaceX, "Returning Starship to the Launch Site," November 7, 2026)

The Space Shuttle came close in spirit, reusing its orbiter and its solid rocket boosters, but it threw away its giant orange external tank on every flight and needed months of refurbishment between missions. SpaceX’s argument is that catching both stages and flying them again quickly is what would make launches routine, and that this is what its Moon and Starlink plans depend on. NASA has already picked a version of Starship as the lander for its Artemis astronauts, a race we looked at in our piece on the push to reach Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole.

How to watch Starship Flight 15

Online

SpaceX’s webcast begins about 30 minutes before liftoff on its Flight 15 page and on its X account, @SpaceX. The company says coverage is planned to continue all the way through the ship catch, with possibly hours of live views from Starship in orbit, beamed down over Starlink. Be wary of streams that show old footage and claim to be live. NASASpaceflight runs a well-known independent camera feed of the pad, but it is not a SpaceX broadcast.

In person near Starbase

The launch site at Boca Chica sits at the very southern tip of Texas, and the area around it is closed during launches: SpaceX says there will be temporary closures of State Highway 4 and Boca Chica Beach. The most popular public viewing spot is Isla Blanca Park at the southern end of South Padre Island, across the water from Starbase, which has parking and restrooms but charges a per-car entry fee and gets badly jammed on launch days. Quieter options listed by the local visitors’ bureau include the Old Causeway area in Port Isabel and the shoulder of Highway 48 (Visit South Padre Island).

For the ship catch, the view is a little different. Starship will arrive from the west over the Rio Grande Valley, swing north of South Padre Island and come in over the Gulf, so people around the island may both see and hear it. Bring binoculars, arrive hours early, and do not book anything non-refundable around one specific day.

If the launch slips

If Friday does not work, SpaceX can try again on the following days with the same window, and the ship catch moves with it. Check the SpaceX mission page and its X account on the day; that is where the company posts changes first.

What counts as success on Flight 15

Best case: both stages caught, 26 satellites delivered, and a ship that looks ready to be cleaned up and flown again. That would be a true first in spaceflight.

Still a very good day: the booster is caught, the satellites go out, and controllers decide to bring Starship down in the Pacific instead of risking the catch. SpaceX has built the flight so that choosing the safe option is part of the plan, not a failure.

A setback: the booster fails to make it back to the tower, which no V3 booster has done yet, or the ship has engine problems early and has to end the mission. SpaceX would then fix the cause and try again on a later flight, as it has after every earlier miss.

Questions people ask about Flight 15

Is the launch really on Friday the 13th?

Yes. November 13, 2026, is a Friday, and that is SpaceX’s target date. Whether it actually flies that day depends on the FAA license, the weather and the final checks on the rocket.

Has anyone caught a rocket upper stage before?

No. Boosters landing and being reused is now routine for SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and Super Heavy has been caught by the tower three times. But no orbital upper stage has ever been brought back to its launch pad and caught. Even reused upper stages, like the Space Shuttle orbiter, landed on runways.

Why catch rockets instead of landing them on legs?

Leaving the legs off saves weight, and catching the vehicle at the tower means it is already where it needs to be to be stacked and launched again. That is the core of SpaceX’s plan to fly Starship far more often than any rocket before it.

How big is Starship?

Stacked together, Starship and Super Heavy stand taller than the Statue of Liberty, and the full rocket is the most powerful ever flown. The booster alone has 33 Raptor engines, and the tower at Pad 2 that will try to catch it is about 480 feet tall.

The bottom line

Flight 15 is the test SpaceX has been building toward since it first stood a steel rocket up on the Texas coast. Catching the booster would prove the new V3 design can come home. Catching the ship would prove something no one has done: that an entire orbital rocket can return to where it started, ready for another launch. It may not all happen on Friday, and SpaceX has made clear it will choose an ocean splashdown over a risky catch. But if the arms close around Starship on Saturday afternoon, it will be one of the most remarkable things a rocket has ever done.

Related on aglena: When Space Junk Makes More Space Junk: The Kessler Syndrome, Explained, AI Data Centers in Space: Can Power and Cooling Work?

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