Starship Pushes Toward Flight 15 as Ship 40 Returns Home

BOCA CHICA, Texas — SpaceX's Starship program is moving on two fronts at once: welcoming home the ship that flew its last mission while prepping the vehicle that will fly the next. The dual activity underscores a development pace that keeps the world's most powerful rocket iterating fast.

Ship 40 Comes Home

Ship 40, which flew Starship's Flight 13, returned to Texas after a 75-day sea journey, arriving at the Port of Brownsville on the morning of October 7 before rolling back to the production site. It rode horizontally on a custom cradle designed to be lifted by SpaceX's self-propelled modular trailers — hardware that doubles as valuable practice for moving ships horizontally, a skill the company will lean on as its fleet grows.

Engineers are expected to run extensive interior inspections now that the vehicle is back, mining it for lessons that feed the next generation of hardware.

The returning ship caps a remarkable stretch for the program, which only recently fired up its latest Starship ahead of another orbital attempt.

Ship 42 Back in the Test Loop

Attention now turns to Ship 42, the vehicle slated for Flight 15 alongside Booster 22. SpaceX pulled all six engines from Ship 42 and rolled it to the Massey's test site for a third cryo-proof test — a thorough, methodical step consistent with the company's test-hard, fly-confident philosophy. The work is believed to involve internal refinements, possibly to engine plumbing, before the ship returns to Mega Bay 2 for engine installation and an eventual static fire.

Flight 15, which may carry a batch of Starlink satellites, is targeting no earlier than November 8, with Booster 22 potentially ready for its own static fire within weeks.

Each flight builds toward an operational cadence that already sees SpaceX setting annual launch records across its wider fleet.

A Pipeline Stretching Into 2027

The manifest beyond Flight 15 is filling in quickly. Flight 16 could become the first Starship launch from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, with Ship 43 and Booster 23 already largely stacked, while additional ships and boosters line up for flights into early 2027. SpaceX is also expanding its build infrastructure to lift production cadence further.

As NASASpaceflight detailed, the choreography of returning, inspecting and re-testing vehicles in parallel is exactly what a maturing, high-tempo program looks like.

With one ship home and the next in the test loop, Starship's march toward routine, rapid flight shows no sign of slowing.