SpaceX will try to bring both halves of Starship home on Friday, a first for an orbital rocket

SpaceX is about to attempt its most ambitious Starship test yet. Flight 15, scheduled for Friday, November 13, aims to return both stages of the world's largest rocket to their launch site. If it works, it will be the first full recovery of an orbital rocket in a single mission.

When to watch

The launch window opens at 5:45 p.m. EST (22:45 UTC) on Friday and stays open for 75 minutes, until 7:00 p.m. EST, at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. SpaceX's own webcast, on its website and its X account, is due to start about 30 minutes before liftoff. As with every Starship flight, the date can slip for weather or technical reasons, and SpaceX hasn't announced backup days.

The plan

Starship has two stages: the Super Heavy booster (this flight uses Booster 22) and the upper stage, which SpaceX simply calls Ship. On earlier flights SpaceX has caught boosters back at the pad with the launch tower's mechanical arms, but it has never brought a Ship home.

This time both are meant to come back:

• The booster should return to Starbase about six and a half minutes after launch.
• The Ship will stay in space far longer than on previous tests. If the mission runs its full length, it would land back at Starbase about 22.5 hours after liftoff, around 4:17 p.m. EST on Saturday, November 14, for an on-time launch.

The flight also has a payload: according to Space.com, it will carry 26 of SpaceX's new Starlink V3 satellites to orbit.

Why a full recovery matters

Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. That's the heart of SpaceX's argument that it can cut the cost of reaching orbit dramatically. The company plans to use it to launch Starlink satellites, to land NASA's Artemis astronauts on the moon and, eventually, to fly crews to Mars. None of that works economically unless both stages can come back and fly again.

Catching the booster has already been shown to work. Landing the Ship back at the pad is the missing half. A success on Friday wouldn't make Starship operational, but it would be the clearest sign yet that the fully reusable design works from start to finish. A failure would most likely mean another round of fixes and another attempt, which is how the program has moved forward so far.