SpaceX plans to catch the upper stage of its Starship megarocket for the first time ever today (Nov. 14), and you can watch the action live.
Starship launched on its 15th test flight on Friday evening (Nov. 13), rising into the sky from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas. The mission plan called for bringing both of the vehicle's stages back to Starbase and catching them with the launch tower's "chopstick" arms — an unprecedented total recovery of an orbital rocket.
That didn't happen, however; SpaceX diverted Starship's Super Heavy booster to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico 6.5 minutes after launch. (SpaceX said later that a guidance and navigaton issue during its descent triggered and automatic abort. But a catch of the Ship upper stage is still on the table, and that would be historic in itself: SpaceX has never tried it before.
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The Ship catch is scheduled to occur today at around 4:20 p.m. EST (2120 GMT; 3:20 p.m. local Texas time) — roughly 22.5 hours after Flight 15 lifted off. You can watch it live here at Space.com.
There's no guarantee that it will happen, however: If SpaceX detects anything off-nominal with Ship, it will scrap the catch attempt, as it did with Super Heavy on Friday afternoon. We'll just have to wait and see.
SpaceX, however, seems confident. Flight controllers decided early Saturday morning, about seven hours after liftoff, to forgo a second window to end the mission early with a splashdown off the coast of Chile.
"Starship's going to stay in space. We are one step closer to an eventual return to launch site," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said in a live commentary update. "So that's great news."
