Starship
The fully reusable rocket meant to make everything else obsolete. Fourteen flights in, it has reached orbit, caught its booster three times, and is about to try something no rocket has ever done.
Starship is a two-stage, fully reusable, methane-fueled rocket: the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage (confusingly, also just “Ship”). Both are meant to fly back and be caught by the launch tower. It is the vehicle for Starlink V3, for NASA's return to the Moon, and — eventually — for Mars.
What happens next: the double catch
Flight 15 — Booster 22 and Ship 42 from Starbase Pad 2 — is targeted for November 2026. The plan is to bring both stages back to the launch tower and catch them in the “chopstick” arms. No orbital rocket has ever been fully recovered at its launch site minutes after flying. Space.com
Musk put the odds at “more likely than not” on the October 20 earnings call and called a success “a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness.” If it fails, he promised “a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year.” Q3 call transcript
Status as of Oct 31, 2026
Booster 22 completed a ~15-second, 33-engine static fire on Oct 25 and Ship 42 a six-engine fire on Oct 27. The FAA licence — which Gwynne Shotwell expects to cover return-to-launch-site for both stages — had not yet been issued. Provisional dates of Nov 8 and Nov 12 circulate but nothing is official.
After that: Flight 16 is provisionally the first Starship launch from Florida's LC-39A, no earlier than December 10 (“super provisional” per NASASpaceflight). The 39A tower is nearly complete and in activation testing; a second Florida pad is rising at SLC-37. Space.com
Targets stated on the Q3 call: weekly Starship launches in the first half of 2027, twice-weekly or more by end-2027, a ship re-flight and the first on-orbit refueling attempt in early 2027.
Every flight, 1 through 14
| # | Date | Vehicles | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apr 20, 2023 | B7 / S24 | Tumbled before staging; destroyed. The pad had no flame diverter and was badly damaged. |
| 2 | Nov 18, 2023 | B9 / S25 | First hot-staging. Booster lost after boostback; ship terminated near end of burn. |
| 3 | Mar 14, 2024 | B10 / S28 | Near-orbital velocity; first in-space propellant transfer demo between tanks. Both stages lost. |
| 4 | Jun 6, 2024 | B11 / S29 | First controlled splashdowns of both stages — ship survived reentry despite a burning flap. |
| 5 | Oct 13, 2024 | B12 / S30 | First booster catch by the tower arms. Ship splashed on target in the Indian Ocean. |
| 6 | Nov 19, 2024 | B13 / S31 | Catch aborted to the Gulf; first in-space Raptor relight; a banana flew as payload. |
| 7 | Jan 16, 2025 | B14 / S33 | Second catch. First Block 2 ship lost ~8 minutes in; debris over Turks & Caicos. |
| 8 | Mar 6, 2025 | B15 / S34 | Third catch. Ship lost control on ascent; debris over the Bahamas. |
| 9 | May 27, 2025 | B14-2 / S35 | First booster reuse. Booster lost over the Gulf; ship broke up over the Indian Ocean. |
| 10 | Aug 26, 2025 | B16 / S37 | Both stages splashed down under control; 8 Starlink simulators deployed; ship landed ~3 m from target. |
| 11 | Oct 13, 2025 | B15-2 / S38 | Last Block 2 flight and last from Pad 1; 8 simulators deployed; clean splashdowns. |
| 12 | May 22, 2026 | B19 / S39 | First V3 vehicles, first launch from Pad 2. Ship deployed 37.5 t of simulators; booster hit the Gulf hard. FAA mishap declared. |
| 13 | Jul 24, 2026 | B20 / S40 | First real Starlink V3 satellites (20, suborbital). Ship made its softest splashdown ever and floated intact. |
| 14 | Sep 28, 2026 | B21 / S41 | First orbit. 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites deployed; ship deorbited after one orbit. First revenue mission. |
Blocks: Flights 1–6 Block 1, 7–11 Block 2, 12–14 Block 3 (“V3”). All launched from Starbase, Texas. Full list
Flight 14: the day Starship reached orbit
At 12:49 UTC on September 28, 2026 — a decade and a day after Musk first unveiled the Mars rocket at the 2016 IAC in Guadalajara — Booster 21 and Ship 41 lifted off from Pad 2. The ship completed an insertion burn to roughly 275 km and deployed 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites, three of them carrying cameras to inspect the heat-shield tiles. Space.com live blog
It wasn't flawless: one Raptor 3 on the ship shut down early during ascent, and the ship deorbited after about one orbit instead of the planned six, splashing into the North Pacific 3 hours 9 minutes after launch. The booster flew a boostback and landing burn to a planned Gulf splashdown — no catch was attempted on a V3 booster yet.
SpaceX called it the “first revenue-generating Starship mission” and said the 26 V3 satellites added roughly ten times the downlink capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch — about 26 Tbps. Q3 2026 results
The last Starship milestone SpaceX published as a stand-alone YouTube film: the Flight 5 booster catch of October 2024. Flight 14's full webcast lives on @SpaceX on X.
V3: the vehicle that flies now
Stacked height (408 ft); 9 m diameter
Super Heavy Block 3 booster; the ship is ~52 m
Liftoff thrust from 33 Raptor 3 engines
Gross liftoff mass; ~3,400 t of propellant in the booster
Payload to low Earth orbit, fully reusable (Musk); 180–200 t expendable (estimates)
Raptor 3 sea-level thrust at ~350 bar chamber pressure
Engine figures come from an independent technical review, not SpaceX. New Space Economy The original V3 booster, B18, was destroyed in November 2025 when a pressure vessel failed during testing; B19 took its place for Flight 12.
Musk said on August 4, 2026 that he'd “consider the heat shield problem solved at this point.” The remaining hard problems are V3 booster recovery — all three V3 boosters so far failed or skipped a tower return — and ship-to-ship propellant transfer, which has still never been attempted. Q2 call
Starbase, Stage Zero and Mechazilla
Stage Zero is SpaceX's name for the launch tower, mount and ground systems — the part of the rocket that doesn't fly. Flight 1 taught the hard lesson: without a flame diverter the pad was wrecked. Mechazilla is the tower itself; its arms (“chopsticks”) stack the vehicle and have caught boosters three times.
- Pad 1 (OLP-1) — 11 launches from April 2023 to October 2025 and all three catches; decommissioned Oct 14, 2025 for a V3 retrofit.
- Pad 2 (OLP-2) — tower stacked Aug 2024, first launch Flight 12 in May 2026; the active pad.
- Starfactory and Gigabay — production target of one ship per day; the old High Bay was demolished in 2025 to make room.
- Massey's test site — where Ship 36 exploded during propellant loading on June 18, 2025 (no injuries).
- Starbase, the city — voters approved incorporation May 3, 2025; it is SpaceX's headquarters, where Musk rang the Nasdaq bell remotely on IPO day.
Starbase Louisiana
Announced August 25, 2026 with Governor Landry: a ~$100 billion second spaceport in Vermilion Parish on a former Exxon site, construction from 2027, first launch officially 2029 (Musk's internal goal: 2028), eventually 20+ towers and “thousands of Starship flights a year.” 3,000 direct jobs averaging $92,600, 30,000+ construction jobs at peak. TechCrunch
Starship on the Moon: HLS and Artemis
NASA picked Starship as the Artemis lunar lander in April 2021 ($2.89B) and added a second mission in 2022 ($1.15B). In February 2026 NASA restructured the program: Artemis III (mid-2027) becomes an Earth-orbit docking test between Orion and the commercial landers, and the first crewed landing moves to Artemis IV in early 2028. Space.com
SpaceX's own target, told to investors in February 2026, is an uncrewed Starship lunar landing in March 2027. Shotwell: “boots on the moon in 2028.” Jared Isaacman — the Polaris astronaut who flew twice on Dragon — was confirmed as NASA Administrator on December 17, 2025.
The gating item for all of it is orbital refueling: a lunar landing needs roughly 10 to high-teens tanker flights depending on who is counting, and the ship-to-ship demo has slipped from March 2025 to March 2026 to “early 2027.”