AINEWS
Catching the booster was the easy half. Catching the upper stage is the engineering step that makes Starship cheap to fly, and Flight 14 will try it, pending FAA sign off.
SpaceX will try to catch the upper stage of Starship with the launch tower's arms as it returns from orbit, tentatively by the end of this month. The plan, which Musk laid out on the company's Aug. 4 earnings call, has two prerequisites: FAA sign-off and preflight engine firings going as planned on both vehicles. The catch has never been done before with the part of the rocket that actually flies to space.
SpaceX has caught the Super Heavy booster on the tower before, several times. The booster is the lower stage that lifts Starship off the pad. Catching it was a milestone, but it is the easier half of reuse: the booster separates two minutes into flight, comes back at suborbital speeds, and only ever flew a few minutes. The Ship, the upper stage, is the rocket. It separates from the booster, lights its own engines, flies to orbit, deploys payloads, and reenters at orbital velocity, far faster than the booster. That is the engineering step Musk is now asking the tower to perform.
Catching on the tower is the cheapest version of reuse because the rocket lands where it launched. There is no ocean recovery, no barge tow-back, no salt-water rinse, no months of refurbishment. The vehicle gets inspected on the pad, restacked, and flown again. The cost case for Starship has always depended on that loop, and it is the part of the program the post-IPO market cap is now underwriting. SpaceX went public in June under the ticker SPCX, and the company is valued at roughly $1.9 trillion.
Flight 13, on July 24, is the data point that makes the catch attempt feel less like a leap. The Ship survived reentry and made a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Heat shielding, flap control, and the soft-landing burn all held. The missing piece in July was the catch itself. Musk is now proposing to add it on Flight 14.
The ship is the part that will also be doing the work, not just surviving it. Flight 14 is slated to deploy Starlink V3 satellites into an operational orbit for the first time. V3 is the larger generation the network's next capacity step depends on, and Starlink is currently the only SpaceX segment operating at a profit, with revenue up 66% year over year to $4.3 billion in the second quarter. Company-wide revenue nearly doubled to $7.8 billion, and the net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1.0 billion. SpaceX closed the quarter with $100 billion in cash and marketable securities and a $47.5 billion backlog earmarked for Starship, Starlink, and an internal AI platform.
Two gates stand between the plan and the catch. The first is technical: SpaceX still needs to complete preflight engine firings on both the Ship and the Super Heavy. The second is regulatory, and it is not on SpaceX's clock. The FAA has to clear the profile, and the company has not said when. The flight could slip into September, and Musk has not committed to a date beyond the end of August.
A missed catch would not end the program. The point of test flights, by SpaceX's own doctrine, is to find the failures that teach the next iteration. Flight 13 itself did not catch, and the program learned from it anyway. The catch on Flight 14 is a specific bet about whether the tower arms, the booster return profile, and the upper-stage return profile can be made to meet at the right altitude and the right speed. If they do, the rocket becomes launch-site-reusable for the first time, and the reuse story moves from planned to demonstrated.
The next milestone is dated, not promised: end of August, pending FAA sign-off, with September as the realistic backup window.