Starship Flight 15 has a date: SpaceX is aiming for a first ship catch on 13 November 🚀

For months the public Starship calendar lived in FAA air-traffic slides and outsider guesses. That changed on 5 November. At the UP.Summit, SpaceX's VP of Launch, Kiko Dontchev, said the company is targeting Friday, 13 November for Starship Flight 15, according to Ars Technica's Eric Berger, who was in the room. It is still a target, not a locked countdown, but it is the first launch day named by a SpaceX launch executive rather than by a planning document.

Why this flight matters

SpaceX has already caught the Super Heavy booster three times, on Flights 5, 7 and 8. The ship is different. It comes home from orbital velocity, and so far every Starship upper stage has ended over the ocean. On the company's third-quarter earnings call in October, Elon Musk said Flight 15 would try to catch both the booster and the ship, and put the odds of a successful ship catch at "more likely than not." If that works, it would be the first time an orbital-class rocket is fully recovered by catching both stages at the launch tower.

Hardware for the attempt is on the pad path. Booster 22 completed a full-duration static fire of all 33 Raptor engines on 25 October. Ship 42 followed with a deorbit-burn simulation on 26 October and a 60-second firing of all six engines the next day. Ship 42 had already practised hanging in the Pad 2 chopsticks in September while crews connected the quick-disconnect arm. Independent trackers list Booster 22 and Ship 42 as the Flight 15 stack, with a first ship catch and a first catch of a Version 3 Super Heavy as the expected profile, pending SpaceX's own confirmation.

What is still open

Honesty matters here. SpaceX has not posted an official Flight 15 mission page or a launch time. The FAA's Starship page did not yet list a Flight 15 licence when the date was reported. Bringing the ship back to Starbase means a reentry path toward land instead of open water, so the licence and the trajectory have to match. Weather, hardware and paperwork can still move the day. Treat 13 November as the working target, not a guarantee.

Flight 14 on 28 September already showed why the cadence is accelerating: that flight reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites before splashdown. Catching the ship is the next engineering chapter after that orbital milestone, not a victory lap.

Why I am watching

Reusable boosters changed launch economics once. A catchable upper stage that returns to the same tower changes the turnaround story again: less ocean recovery theatre, more "stack, fuel, fly." Even a near-miss teaches more than another perfect splashdown. I will be watching for SpaceX's mission page, the FAA licence, and then for whether the chopsticks close on steel that has just come back from orbit.

Sources

Will a first ship catch feel more like Falcon 9 landing on a droneship, or like something entirely new?

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