SpaceX Catches Starship in the Tower After a Day in Orbit
SpaceX caught its Starship upper stage in the mechanical arms of its launch tower this weekend, the first time the vehicle has come back from orbit to the pad it left, a manoeuvre the company calls the missing link in building a fully reusable rocket.
The ship, 171 feet tall, dropped out of thick cloud over Starbase in Texas, relit its engines to swing upright and settled between the tower arms, still firing, blackened by the heat of reentry. The tower's arms, which the company calls Mechazilla, closed on the vehicle as it hovered.
And the flight was the longest yet. Starship spent about 22 and a half hours in space and circled the planet 14 times after releasing 26 Starlink satellites, then came down over the Pacific at roughly 17,000 miles per hour.
The catch is the point of the exercise. Falcon 9's first stage lands and flies again, but its second stage, the part that carries payloads into orbit, is thrown away after every launch.
The booster did not come back. Super Heavy failed to reach the pad about ten minutes after liftoff because of an onboard navigation fault, which ended the plan to recover both halves of the rocket on one flight.
But the ship's return changes what the company can promise. "That was the missing link, the holy grail of spaceflight," said Dan Huot, a SpaceX mission commentator, and Elon Musk posted that "Ship 42 looks great" beside photographs from the tower.
SpaceX has spent roughly a decade on Starship, which Musk sees as the vehicle for the Starlink business, for data centres in orbit, for a return to the moon and eventually for Mars.
Super Heavy had been caught three times before, the last of them in the spring of 2025. The company had not tried a catch since, either because it meant to ditch the booster in the Gulf of Mexico or because of a fault on board.
So half the rocket came home to the tower and the other half did not, and full reuse now depends on repeating both on the same flight.
Starship returned from orbit into the tower arms at Starbase, Texas
It flew for about 22 and a half hours and made 14 orbits
The Super Heavy booster failed to return because of a navigation fault
Falcon 9 already reuses its first stage but discards its second
Super Heavy had been caught three times before, most recently in the spring of 2025
Source: Reuters
