{"id":935863,"date":"2026-10-21T06:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T06:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/935863\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T06:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T06:48:14","slug":"spacex-will-attempt-1st-ever-double-starship-rocket-catch-on-next-test-launch-elon-musk-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/935863\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX will attempt 1st-ever double Starship rocket catch on next test launch, Elon Musk says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starship<\/a> megarocket during the vehicle’s next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk<\/a> announced during SpaceX’s quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).<\/p>\n

If SpaceX<\/a> succeeds, this “will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered,” Musk said. “The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth<\/a> on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness.”<\/p>\n

\n

\"illustration\n<\/p>\n

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX catching the upper stage of its Starship megarocket, something the company expects to do on the vehicle’s 15th test flight. (Image credit: SpaceX)<\/p>\n

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As Musk noted, both of its stages \u2014 the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft \u2014 are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars <\/a>settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

Starship’s recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX’s Falcon 9<\/a> and Falcon Heavy<\/a> rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its “chopstick” arms.<\/p>\n

This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year<\/a> by 2030.<\/p>\n

\"Space\"<\/p>\n

Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy<\/a> on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.<\/p>\n

Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)<\/p>\n

“I’d say it’s more likely than not that this succeeds next flight,” he said. “And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year.”<\/p>\n

What to read next<\/p>\n

Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever<\/a>. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX’s Starlink Version 3 satellites \u2014 the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit<\/a> that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today’s call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX’s financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.<\/p>\n

And that performance<\/a> was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.<\/p>\n

Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX’s launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments \u2014 connectivity (services provided by its Starlink<\/a> megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, “superintelligence”).<\/p>\n

SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That’s why it’s building the infrastructure<\/a> to support thousands of Starship launches per year \u2014 to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers<\/a> to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it’s positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.<\/p>\n

“In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of ’27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion,” Musk said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter SpaceX will soon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":935864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-935863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}