Starship Live Updates: SpaceX Makes History With Successful Rocket Landing in Texas

Starship Live Updates: SpaceX Rocket Headed for Milestone Landing in Texas SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft has dropped out of orbit and will attempt to land back at the Starbase launch facility. If it is successful, it will mark a major step in SpaceX’s quest to build fully reusable rockets. Watch Starship Flight 15https://t.co/xvmIH2diNA — SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 13, 2026 Latest After launching on Friday and circling Earth for the better part of a day, the latest test flight of Starship, SpaceX’s spacecraft, is minutes away from potentially making history. The orbital craft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday afternoon and, for the first time, was on track to return to the launchpad where it started. This maneuver is crucial to making Starship a reusable rocket. How can you land a rocket to use it again? On four legs? Or with parachutes? What about … giant chopsticks? SpaceX is on a quest to make spacecraft run like trains and airplanes. As part of this vision, it is counting on a tower with two mechanical arms called the “chopsticks” to catch its Starship spacecraft when it returns from orbit on Saturday. If all goes according to plan, Starship will travel through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound before being steered back into the tower it launched from in South Texas. There, the mechanical arms will squeeze it safely into place, like chopsticks holding a piece of sushi. The company has already proved the arms can catch a rocket booster minutes after liftoff. But the Saturday attempt will be the first such landing for the upper-stage spacecraft, which is also called Starship but is often shortened to Ship. The latest mission had to cancel an unprecedented “double-catch” attempt after its rocket booster was diverted on Friday for a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Although catches will not be part of NASA’s Artemis III mission next year, a successful one on Saturday would be seen as a breakthrough for the potential of rockets to be repeatedly flown. “But if something goes really wrong with Starship, it could take out the whole tower,” said Alistair John, director of the aerospace engineering program at the University of Sheffield in England. “It’s higher risk, higher reward.” Joseph Gonzalez, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who worked on the Artemis II mission, said the arms offer a better chance to save a rocket for reuse than more traditional forms of landing. Landing the rocket on legs tacks on weight and thus a need for more fuel. Parachute landings can add on days for an ocean recovery, Gonzalez said. The tower holds the promise of catching Ship in the exact place from where it could be launched again. “Time is always of the essence, especially if you’re talking about rapid reusability,” Gonzalez said. Still, John said, SpaceX has a ways to go to catch both parts of its rocket and launch them into space again. The rocket’s heat shield will “take a beating” on its way down through the atmosphere on Saturday, and SpaceX will have to prove next that it and other key components like the engines are “OK to go again,” he said. In the modern space race, China has successfully caught a rocket booster with giant nets. SpaceX already has a partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which can rapidly send satellites into orbit. Its booster lands on legs. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSo how will Starship make it home? SpaceX will fire the spacecraft’s engines to slow it down, so it can fall out of orbit. Then it will fall through the atmosphere, “a bit like a skydiver,” said Alistair John, the aerospace engineering director at the University of Sheffield in England. Similar to a skydiver moving his arms and legs, four flaps deployed on the spacecraft will allow for slight steering. Air resistance slows it down in a big belly flop through the atmosphere. At the end, the engines will relight to flip the spacecraft vertically into a hover — and then hopefully right into the tower’s mechanical arms. SpaceX’s Starship is slated to participate in its first NASA mission sometime in the second half of next year, as part of the space agency’s efforts to return humans to the moon. NASA’s Artemis program aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of 2028, but the next mission, Artemis III, will stay in orbit around Earth. The main objective of this flight is to practice docking with two prototype lunar landers. Artemis III is similar to what NASA did half a century ago with Apollo 9. That often overlooked mission provided a crucial check that the lander would work as designed. During Artemis III, which is expected to last 14 to 17 days, four astronauts will launch inside the Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System rocket from Florida. Once in orbit, Orion will try to dock with the Blue Moon spacecraft built by Blue Origin, the space company started by Jeff Bezos. The astronauts will be able to enter a crew cabin on Blue Moon. On the sixth day of the mission, SpaceX will launch a Starship. This spacecraft will largely be a run-of-the-mill version pulled off SpaceX’s assembly line, but with a docking port attached at the top. The spacecraft will not include modifications like a crew cabin or a life support system, which will be needed for the lunar lander version. That means the Artemis III astronauts will not be able to enter Starship. However, a successful docking will offer data on a change that SpaceX is seeking for the moon mission. Instead of Starship and Orion traveling separately to lunar orbit and docking there, SpaceX wants the two spacecraft to dock in low-Earth orbit, and then Starship would provide the propulsion to get them to the moon. On the eighth day of the mission, Orion is expected to dock with Starship for two hours, in order to test whether the combined spacecraft will perform, considering that Orion was not originally designed for that configuration. “It gives us critical data and allows us to really understand the forces of docking, how we’re going to push, how we’re going to work together,” Jeremy Parsons, NASA’s Artemis program manager, said during a news conference in October. Parsons said he was also interested in another crucial demonstration that was planned for early next year, showing that ultracold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants can be transferred from one Starship to another. Because Starship uses up most of its propellant just to reach orbit, it will need to refill its tanks before heading to the moon. “This is going to be a first-of-its-kind SpaceX mission where they’re going to launch two starships in quick succession,” one from Texas and one from Florida, Parsons said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou might notice “DON’T PANIC” on the side of Starship. This is a reference to Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” This particular ship is No. 42 off the production line, and in Adams’s book, 42 was the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Dan Huot, the SpaceX commentator, says SpaceX has another option to avoid flying over land, if the team determines it’s risky for the spacecraft to fly over populated areas. SpaceX could command Starship to tumble into the atmosphere, which would bring it down in the Pacific. On Friday, SpaceX gave reporters a rare tour of its Starship manufacturing facility in Texas, named Starfactory. SpaceX did not allow any photographs or videos to be taken during the visit. But it is hard to imagine the million-square-foot factory that builds Starship without walking through it. Each rocket is more than 400 feet high and 30 feet wide, and the numbers do not convey the immensity. Even though it is building the biggest rocket ever, Starfactory is more like a toy factory or an automobile assembly line than a traditional aerospace factory, said Justin Styer, senior director of Starship launch at SpaceX. “Traditionally, rockets, airplanes, whatever, have been these extremely precious, artisanal, one-off creations,” Styer said. “SpaceX works really differently. Our whole idea is to kind of incorporate automotive methods, incorporate just general, more mass-manufactured things, to the rocket space.” “We’re trying to make it very normal, very sort of pedestrian with its consistency so that humanity can take advantage of it like any other transport system,” he added. The SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, Calif., where the company makes its Falcon 9 rockets, was originally a factory for airplane fuselages. The Texas site was built from the bottom up for the company’s rockets. In the Starfactory entrance lobby, a giant globe of Mars hangs from the ceiling, a reminder of Elon Musk’s ultimate destination for Starship. Five floors of office space in the front of the building include walkways that overlook the bright, cavernous space of Starfactory. Almost everything, including the floors and girders rising to the ceilings, is gleaming white, with some swaths of black. It seems that an unofficial uniform for SpaceX employees consists of a black T-shirt and jeans. Pieces of the rocket in various stages of manufacture line up along the assembly line. Half of the factory is devoted to the Super Heavy booster and half is “Shipland,” an area set aside for building the upper-stage spacecraft that goes into orbit. A wide-open aisle extends the length of the floor between the two. It takes seven to eight months to complete one booster or one Ship, but there are so many under construction simultaneously that one booster is completed every four weeks and one Ship every two weeks, said Danny Fain, director of booster production. Once finished, they are taken to nearby tall buildings known as megabays where the Raptor engines are installed. Fain said it used to take five to six hours to attach one engine. Now, SpaceX has sped up the process to 30 minutes, he said. SpaceX’s goal is to make space travel seem “extremely lame,” Styer said — something ordinary and common, not rare and expensive. “We hope to unimpress you with the normalcy after seeing a lot of rocket parts,” he told the reporters. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt is very different now. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen is the launch, and how can I watch it? You can watch SpaceX’s coverage in the player above. What is Starship? What is happening during this flight? The SpaceX webcast commentators said they did not know why the booster catch attempt was called off. Is there any danger as Ship crosses the United States toward landing? What comes after this test flight? Why is Starship important for NASA? Wasn’t Starship supposed to be heading to Mars already? On board would be Optimus humanoid robots built by Tesla, Mr. Musk’s car company.