SpaceX launched Starship Flight 15 on Friday, 13 November 2026, from its Starbase site in Texas. The upper stage, Ship 42, reached orbit and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites, but the Super Heavy first stage never came home: the planned catch by the launch tower was called off and the booster fell into the Gulf of Mexico, the Associated Press reported in coverage summarised by Ad Hoc News. It was the first attempt by SpaceX, the US rocket and satellite operator, to recover both major Starship stages at the launch site on a single mission.
What a Starlink V3 satellite is
Starlink V3 is the third-generation spacecraft in SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation. Tech Times reports that the V3 satellites are too large and heavy to fly on any other rocket in the SpaceX fleet, including Falcon 9, and that the generation is designed to deliver significantly higher throughput than earlier Starlink satellites. Starship is therefore the only vehicle that can put this part of the network into orbit. Neither Tech Times nor the other outlets reviewed for this report published a per-satellite capacity figure in gigabits or terabits per second, so the size of that throughput gain is not quantified in the public reporting on this flight.
Key facts
- Ship 42 reached what shattered.io, an aggregator that collates launch coverage rather than reporting from the pad, calls a nominal orbit at roughly 170 miles, or 275 kilometres, citing Ars Technica and CNBC.
- A catch of Ship 42 by the tower’s mechanical arms was planned for Saturday, 14 November 2026. Ad Hoc News puts the orbital stay at about 22 hours; shattered.io says the attempt was set for about 22.5 hours after liftoff.
- The booster catch was aborted rather than failed on approach, and no cause has been published. NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth described the double catch attempt as thwarted, shattered.io says.
How Flight 15 compares with earlier tests
Tech Times reports that Flight 15 flew Booster 22 and Ship 42, the fourth pairing built to the larger Starship V3 design standard, from Orbital Launch Pad 2 at Starbase. It says Flight 14, on 28 September 2026, was the first Starship mission to reach orbit and deploy a payload — also 26 Starlink V3 satellites — with the booster splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and the ship in the Pacific.
The sources do not agree on what came before that. Tech Times says all Starship test missions before Flight 14 ended without deploying any payload. TradingKey says Flight 13 deployed 20 production V3 satellites on a suborbital test trajectory in July, and that what made Flight 14 different was the orbit and the payload delivery element. TradingKey also says SpaceX reported that one Super Heavy Raptor engine shut down during Flight 14’s ascent, that Reuters reported an unexpected engine shutdown, and that the propulsion issues remain under investigation.
The booster catch that did not happen
shattered.io says none of the outlets it reviewed names a failed engine, a tower problem or a guidance fault, and SpaceX has not published a post-flight explanation that those outlets could verify. The aggregator notes the general logic the programme works to: the tower is shared infrastructure that has to launch the next vehicle, a failed catch can damage it, and a booster reporting an off-nominal condition is safer ditched at sea.
The Saturday ship catch
SpaceX said it would proceed with the Ship 42 catch only if system checks showed the vehicle was healthy enough to return, shattered.io reports, and described early deorbit options as available if something looked wrong. No report available at the time of its publication confirmed a catch. The orbit altitude, the satellite count and the nominal-orbit label all come from launch coverage and the SpaceX webcast rather than an independent flight data release.
The business behind the flights
TradingKey, writing on 5 October 2026, reported that SpaceX’s connectivity revenue rose 66% year on year in the second quarter to $4.291 billion, with operating income up 79% to $1.656 billion, and that Starlink ended the quarter with 12 million subscribers against six million a year earlier, at average monthly revenue per user of $66. That $66 figure is the closest public proxy for what a typical Starlink customer pays each month; none of the reviewed outlets published a current retail price list or plan tier, and current country-level figures are tracked on our Starlink availability and pricing page. TradingKey described Starship as still in a development-heavy phase, alongside the AI segment that now sits alongside Starlink.
On cadence, Tech Times reports that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on Fox News he expects near-weekly Starship launches going into 2027, and that Musk projected weekly or twice-weekly flights that year. Completing a full recovery of both stages from one flight, which Tech Times calls the primary engineering goal of Flight 15, remains unachieved.
Why it matters
Ad Hoc News frames the stakes for investors around reusability: a successful spacecraft catch would add to SpaceX’s flight experience, while the aborted booster catch shows the execution demands of scaling the system. None of the reviewed outlets ranked the mission’s two halves against each other. On this site’s reading, the deployment is the half that reaches paying customers — every production V3 released adds capacity to the network subscribers buy service on, while the catch attempts buy flight experience toward cheaper launches later. That places Flight 15 alongside Starlink’s share of SpaceX’s launch manifest this year and the company’s talk of the next generation beyond V3.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has SpaceX ever caught a Starship upper stage before?
No. Tech Times reports that SpaceX has caught Super Heavy boosters with the Mechazilla tower arms several times since October 2024, but every Starship upper stage until Flight 15 ended its flight with an ocean splashdown.
What odds did Elon Musk give the first ship catch attempt?
Tech Times reports that Musk said in September a ship catch would be attempted on Flight 15 if Flight 14 went well, and he put the chance of success on the first try at between 50 and 60 percent. Tech Times adds that Musk said recovered Flight 15 hardware could be reflown on Flight 16 if both catches worked.
Does Flight 15 change where Starlink satellite internet is available?
Not immediately. None of the reviewed outlets reported a coverage, capacity or service change tied to this batch, and the satellites were released into an insertion orbit rather than their operating altitude. shattered.io, which aggregates launch coverage, says confirmation of how many satellites are healthy will emerge over days and weeks through orbital tracking.
How many Starship launches can SpaceX fly from Starbase?
Tech Times reports that the US Federal Aviation Administration has approved up to 25 Starship launches per year from Starbase, and that SpaceX is also building pad infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A to support higher cadence across multiple sites.
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