SpaceX will attempt first double Starship rocket capture during next test launch, says Elon Musk
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SpaceX will soon achieve a major milestone in spaceflight, if all goes according to plan.
The company will try to catch up on the two stages of its Spacecraft megarocket during the vehicle’s next test flight, scheduled for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX’s third quarter (Q3) earnings call today (October 20).
If EspaceX succeeds, it “will be the first time an orbital launcher has been fully recovered,” Musk said. “The only way for us to expand consciousness beyond Earth on a durable basis is a fully reusable orbital launcher. So this is, I think, a major technological step in the history of civilization and consciousness. »
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, measuring more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.
As Musk noted, its two stages – the Super Heavy booster and the Ship spacecraft – are designed to be fully and quickly reusable, an advancement that SpaceX says will achieve March colonization and other great, economically feasible feats of exploration.
Starship’s recovery strategy is different from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 And Heavy Falcon rockets, partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have replaceable upper stages). The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters return to Earth on landing platforms near the launch site or on ships at sea downstream. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will head straight for their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its “wand” arms.
This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and fly Starship again at an accelerated pace, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he plans to launch Starship. more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.
Starship has completed 14 test flights to date and SpaceX has succeeded chopsticks catch with Super Heavy on three of them. The company hasn’t yet tried to catch up with Ship, which is a more difficult proposition because the upper stage travels higher, further and faster than the booster.
Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will succeed in catching a ship on the first try. (He did not give a specific date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)
“I would say it is more likely than not that the next flight will be successful,” he said. “And if not, we will have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and then it will accelerate next year.”
Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on September 28, the ship reached orbit for the very first time. It also deployed 26 Starlink version 3 satellites from SpaceX, the first 26 members of a next-generation broadband constellation in low earth orbit which will end up understanding approximately 100,000 spaceships.
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 the third quarter, the three-month period that ended September 30.
And this performance was solid, company representatives said. SpaceX reported revenue of $14.6 billion in the third quarter, a 161% increase from the $5.6 billion earned in the third quarter of 2025. The company reported a net profit of $4.4 billion in the third quarter, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same period last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.
Just $1.8 billion of Q3 2026 revenue came from SpaceX’s launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments: connectivity (services provided by its Star link megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration recently renamed it “superintelligence”).
SpaceX believes these latter two segments will continue to grow. That’s why it’s build the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year – to launch numerous Starlink satellites and AI Data Centers to Earth’s orbit. And the company believes it is in a position to actually start raising cash, as early as next year.
“In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX’s annual recurring revenue by the end of 27 is somewhere between $500 billion and a trillion,” Musk said.
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