SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit on Friday, November 13, only the second time the giant rocket has ever done so. But the mission’s other half went wrong. The Super Heavy booster, the part of the rocket meant to fly back and be caught by the launch tower, was diverted over the Gulf of Mexico and exploded.
The 124-metre Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — lifted off from Starbase in southern Texas at 5:47 p.m. ET on Friday, on its 15th test flight since 2023. The plan was the most ambitious yet: a full round trip, with both the booster and the ship returning to the launch tower to be caught by its giant mechanical arms.
What happened to the Starship Flight 15 booster
The launch itself went well. The two stages separated cleanly a few minutes into the flight. Then, for reasons SpaceX has not yet explained, an unspecified problem with the Super Heavy booster forced the company to abort its recovery. Instead of flying back to the launch tower, the booster was diverted to a fixed point over the Gulf of Mexico, where it hovered briefly before exploding a short distance over the sea surface. A section of it was left sticking out of the water vertically.
‘Not sure right now why we weren’t able to bring it back,’ SpaceX’s Dan Huot said on the launch broadcast. The company has not shared details of the issue.
The failure scuttled what would have been a landmark moment: the first time both parts of the rocket were recovered on the same flight. The booster was a new version — the V3 Super Heavy, which only began flying this year. A successful catch would have been the first recovery of a V3 booster. SpaceX has previously recovered three of the older V1 boosters and reused two of them.
Starship reaches orbit and deploys 26 satellites
The upper stage — the Starship spacecraft itself — did its job. It reached orbit about 27 minutes after launch, at 6:13 p.m. ET, completing a second engine burn of about 20 seconds to enter low Earth orbit at an altitude of around 275 kilometres. It was only the second time Starship has reached orbit. The first was Flight 14, on September 28.
The ship began releasing its cargo of 26 Starlink V3 satellites about 36 minutes into the flight, in a deployment operation expected to take less than an hour. The 33 Raptor 3 engines on the Super Heavy had pushed the vehicle upward with about 8,200 tonnes of thrust.
The ship was expected to circle the globe 14 times and stay in space for more than 21 hours before coming back. SpaceX planned to bring it home on Saturday, with a catch attempt scheduled for around 4:17 p.m. ET. If the catch works, it will be the first time the upper stage of Starship has ever been recovered. If the final approach looks too risky, the ship will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico instead.
Why this flight matters
The point of Starship is reusability. A rocket that can fly, land, and fly again would drastically cut the cost of getting to space and make frequent launches possible. That is the idea behind the whole programme, and it is why SpaceX keeps trying to catch both parts of the rocket instead of letting them fall into the sea.
The previous flight showed how hard that is. Flight 14, in September, reached orbit for the first time despite some engines shutting down mid-flight. That mission was planned to last 10 hours but ended after roughly three, with the upper stage splashing down intact into the Pacific Ocean before bursting into flames.
Flight 15 got further. The ship reached orbit cleanly and deployed its satellites. The booster did not come back, and SpaceX does not yet know why. That is the pattern of this programme so far: each flight gets a little further, and each failure teaches the company something it did not know.
The bottom line
Starship Flight 15 put a spacecraft into orbit and deployed 26 satellites — only the second time it has managed that. But the booster, the part SpaceX most wanted back, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico after its catch was aborted. The ship itself was still due back on Saturday, and if SpaceX catches it, the flight will still end as a milestone. If not, it will be another lesson in how hard it is to bring a rocket home.