SpaceX will make spaceflight history this week, if all goes according to plan.
The company announced over the weekend that it's targeting Friday (Nov. 13) for the 15th test flight of its Starship megarocket, which will attempt something that's never been done before.
"The upcoming flight is planned to be the first to return both Starship and Super Heavy to the launch site for catch," SpaceX wrote in a description of Flight 15. "If successful, this will mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch system and a breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket."
Super Heavy is Starship's giant booster, and Starship (or Ship for short) is its upper-stage spacecraft. As SpaceX's description noted, both elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
"Catch" refers to SpaceX's recovery mechanism for both stages: Each will return to the launch mount at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas and be plucked out of the sky by the tower's "chopstick" arms.
SpaceX has caught Super Heavy on three Starship flights to date, but it has never tried the maneuver with Ship. It's a taller order; Ship flies higher and farther than Super Heavy, so its return to Earth is more complex and energetic.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk already told us that Flight 15 would likely feature a double-catch attempt. But the newly released mission description gives us a launch date, as well as details about the flight.
Flight 15 is scheduled to launch from Starbase on Friday during a 75-minute window that opens at 5:45 p.m. EST (2245 GMT; 4:45 p.m. local Texas time).
Super Heavy will come back to Starbase for its tower catch about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, if all goes to plan. But Ship will stay up quite a bit longer.
The upper stage will go orbital, something Starship did for the first time on Flight 14 on Sept. 28. And, as on Flight 14, Ship will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites, the vanguard of a new megaconstellation that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft, according to Musk.
But Ship should stay aloft for much longer on Flight 15 than it did on Flight 14, which ended with a splashdown in the northern Pacific Ocean about three hours after liftoff.
"Starship’s initial return to launch site mission is expected to orbit the Earth at an altitude of ~275 km [171 miles] and complete approximately 14 orbits around the planet over the course of a more than 22-hour flight," SpaceX wrote in its description of Flight 15.
"Similar to Starship’s first orbital mission, the flight profile has been designed with the opportunity to insert into a passively safe suborbital trajectory or safely deorbit at multiple pre-determined areas over the ocean after raising to an orbital altitude," the company added.
So there's no guarantee that Ship will indeed come back to Starbase for a catch on Flight 15; SpaceX will call off the try if anything is amiss. Whatever happens, however, you should definitely tune in. It's not every day, after all, that you can watch a rocket the size of a 40-story building take flight.
