BOCA CHICA, Texas — SpaceX is nearing one of the hardest milestones in rocketry. Elon Musk says the company will likely attempt to catch a Starship upper stage with its launch tower arms "in a few months," a step that would push the towering vehicle toward the full and rapid reusability at the heart of the program.
The Last Great Catch
SpaceX has already caught the giant Super Heavy booster with the Starbase tower's mechanical arms several times since its first success in October 2024. Catching the "ship" — the upper stage — is a categorically harder feat, because it returns from near-orbital velocity through a searing reentry before flipping vertical for a precise, millimeter-tolerance capture between the arms.
Musk said the groundwork is largely in place. After a recent flight, he noted the ship's landing was accurate enough that "it would have been caught by the tower arms" had one been waiting, and he added that the first reflight of a Starship vehicle should come by the end of 2026 or early 2027 — a moment he called "a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars." Musk laid out the timeline in a series of posts as the company works through data from its most recent test.
Why Reusability Changes Everything
Catching both stages at the launch site would let SpaceX inspect, refuel and refly Starship with minimal refurbishment, collapsing the cost of reaching orbit. That economic leap underpins nearly every ambition riding on the vehicle, from deploying next-generation Starlink V3 satellites to NASA's Artemis moon landings and, eventually, Mars. SpaceX has been scaling its Starlink constellation at a record pace, and the bigger V3 satellites need Starship's payload capacity to deploy economically.
A Deliberate, Data-Driven March
Musk framed the catch as the next step in a sequence rather than a leap, emphasizing that SpaceX will attempt it only when the data supports it. The near-term focus remains the vehicle's first full orbital mission, and the company recently cleared a full-duration static fire on its next Starship, the last major hardware checkpoint before flight.
That measured cadence has defined Starship's rise: each flight banks a little more capability than the last, from booster catches to ever-more-precise ocean landings. With the ship now landing within the tower's catch window and a first reflight on the horizon, SpaceX is closing in on a capability no one has ever demonstrated — one that would make the world's largest rocket also its most reusable, and bring Musk's vision of routine, low-cost spaceflight within reach.
