SpaceX Releases Starship Flight 15 Plan: First Double Catch Targeted for November 13

SpaceX has published what Flight 15 will try to do, and it is the most ambitious Starship mission yet flown. In a post on Saturday, November 7, the company said Flight 15 is targeting launch as early as Friday, November 13, pending regulatory approval, and released the flight plan for the mission: the first ever attempt to return both Starship and Super Heavy to the launch site and catch both with the tower on a single flight.

The mission is scheduled to lift off from Orbital Launch Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas, in a 75-minute window opening at 4:45 p.m. CT (22:45 UTC), according to the released plan. It pairs Booster 22, a Block 3 Super Heavy, with Ship 42 — the fourth pair of Block 3 vehicles to fly.

Flight 15 will be Starship's second orbital mission, after Flight 14 launched on September 28, and at roughly 22 hours it is planned to be the longest Starship flight to date.

SpaceX is targeting Friday, November 13, 2026, with a 75-minute window opening at 4:45 p.m. CT from Starbase, pending regulatory approval. The date itself is new: Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic planning material had earlier pointed to no earlier than November 8, then November 12, before SpaceX vice president of launch Kiko Dontchev gave the November 13 target at the UP.Summit on November 5.

Treat the date as a target, not a countdown. SpaceX's own wording is 'as early as' November 13, and the flight still needs its regulatory approval; Starship dates have moved repeatedly through the autumn, including this one.

It is exactly what it sounds like. Super Heavy's job is to boost Starship onto its orbital trajectory, then return to Starbase to be caught by the launch tower's chopstick arms. Starship, after completing its mission in orbit, will deorbit, reenter and — if all goes to plan — also be caught by the tower at Orbital Launch Pad 2. No ship has ever been caught before; this would also be the first catch of Starship's V3 iteration.

On SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call on October 20, Elon Musk said Flight 15 would attempt to catch both vehicles and put the odds of a successful ship catch at 'more likely than not,' while stressing that success is not guaranteed. The released plan builds in abort options throughout the ship's flight: at numerous points, a problem that makes a return unsafe can instead end with the ship deorbited safely over the ocean.

Ship 42 is planned to reach approximately 170 miles (275 kilometres) above Earth and complete about 14 orbits over a mission lasting roughly 22 hours. During the flight it will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites — real operational payload, not test mass — before performing its deorbit burn for the return to Starbase.

The hardware has been readied through the autumn: Booster 22 completed a full-duration static fire of all 33 Raptor engines at Pad 2 on October 25, and Ship 42 has completed its own static fire tests ahead of the campaign.

Regulatory approval is the open item. SpaceX's November 7 post frames the November 13 target as 'pending regulatory approval,' and reporting through the week noted the FAA had not yet issued the Flight 15 licence — a mission that returns the ship to the launch site instead of splashing it down at sea is not covered by simply repeating the previous flight's paperwork.

Once approval and any airspace and maritime closures are posted, the window firms up. Until then, November 13 is the plan SpaceX is working to, with the flight plan itself — trajectory, deployment count, catch sequence — now public for the first time.

The 26 Starlink V3 satellites Ship 42 deploys will join the tracked orbital catalog alongside everything else circling Earth. WorldEye's satellite tracker follows those catalogued objects on the live globe, and the space station tracker keeps the International Space Station's position on the same map — two of the data layers that sit alongside the site's 74,229 cameras.

If the double catch succeeds, Flight 15 will be remembered as the flight Starship became a fully reusable system in practice. If it does not, the abort options in the plan are designed so the attempt still ends safely over open ocean.