SpaceX is getting ready for what could be the most important Starship flight yet. The company is targeting Friday, November 13, for Starship Flight 15, a mission that will try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage back at the launch site for the first time, as reported by SpaceNews. Here’s the plan, drawn from SpaceX’s official Flight 15 mission page.

The launch window

SpaceX says Flight 15 could launch as soon as November 13, pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 4:45 p.m. Central time. A live webcast is scheduled to start about 30 minutes before liftoff, and SpaceX says coverage is planned to continue through the ship catch, potentially with hours of live views from orbit via Starlink. As always, the company notes the schedule could change.

Why a double catch is a big deal

SpaceX has caught Super Heavy boosters before: three first-version boosters were caught on earlier flights, and two of them flew again. But it has never caught the Starship upper stage. If both catches succeed, SpaceX says it “will mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch system,” a key step toward a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. Reuse on that scale is central to SpaceX’s plans for cheaper launches, its Starlink network and future Moon missions.

The booster’s job

The Super Heavy booster’s tasks are launch, ascent, stage separation, a boostback burn and a return to the launch site for a catch by the tower’s arms. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster. According to SpaceX’s timeline, the booster catch is expected about 6 minutes and 35 seconds after liftoff.

The ship’s 22-hour flight

The Starship upper stage has a longer day ahead. It’s planned to reach an orbit of about 275 kilometers, circle Earth roughly 14 times and deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites. SpaceX says each V3 satellite adds 1 terabit of capacity, so the batch equals about 10 Falcon 9 launches of the smaller V2 Mini satellites.

Three of those satellites carry cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and send images to engineers. Those images are one of several data sources that will help decide whether the ship is healthy enough to come home. After more than 22 hours of flight, the plan calls for a deorbit burn, reentry, a landing flip and a catch at Starbase, with the timeline putting the catch about 22 hours and 32 minutes after launch.

Safety first, catch second

SpaceX stresses that the ship will only return to the launch site if the flight control team confirms that systems critical for reentry, the landing burn and the tower approach are healthy. The mission includes several return checks along the way. If something isn’t right, the flight profile allows Starship to take a passively safe suborbital path or deorbit safely over the ocean.

Heat shield upgrades

The ship’s heat shield will include fixes from Flight 14, SpaceX’s first orbital mission, which launched September 28. Those include extra retention for tiles in high-risk areas, steps to stop hot plasma from getting behind tiles, and a curved tile design across a large part of the vehicle that has shown less heating in the gaps between tiles.

The bottom line

Flight 15 aims to do something no orbital rocket has done: bring both stages home and catch them. Even a partial success would give SpaceX valuable data, but a clean double catch would be a milestone for reusable spaceflight. Watch for an updated launch time and regulatory approval in the days ahead.

Image: Launch of SpaceX Starship 6 rocket seen from the International Space Station (iss072e220043, cropped) by NASA/Don Pettit via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0