Jeff Foust

4–5 minutes

WASHINGTON — The next flight of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle is now unlikely to involve an attempt to catch the vehicle’s upper stage back at the launch site as the launch slips into September.

In SpaceX’s second-quarter earnings call Aug. 4, Chief Executive Elon Musk announced that the next flight of Starship, then planned for the end of August, would be the vehicle’s first mission to orbit, deploying Starlink satellites to an “operational orbit.”

Musk also said that, on that upcoming flight, SpaceX would attempt for the first time to return the Starship upper stage, or ship, to the company’s Starbase, Texas, launch site, where it would be caught by the launch tower. The company has previously demonstrated the ability to catch the larger Super Heavy booster back at the launch site.

“I would say things look very good, and that’s why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month,” he said.

However, in a social media post Aug. 20, Musk appeared to back off from those plans. “Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months,” he wrote. He didn’t elaborate on the change in schedule. He added, though, that he believed SpaceX would make its first reflight of a ship “either end of this year or early next.”

The date of the next Starship launch, Flight 14, has also been slipping. While Musk said in the earnings call it was planned for the end of August, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at an Aug. 14 event he expected the launch to take place in early September as part of an increased cadence needed to support NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.

“If they’re able to launch again in early September after their last launch and continue to track inside of a month, potentially every couple of weeks before the end of the year,” he said of SpaceX’s Starship launch plans, “we’re going to feel very good about their timing to contribute to Artemis 3 next year.”

An early September launch, though, appears unlikely. An Aug. 20 briefing for airspace managers about upcoming launches listed a Sept. 15 date for Flight 14.

The revisions to the plans for Flight 14 come as SpaceX continues to work to retrieve the ship from Flight 13, which launched July 24 and splashed down in the Indian Ocean. While ships on previous launches broke apart and exploded after splashing down, the ship for Flight 13 survived splashdown and floated in the ocean.

SpaceX has been working since then to tow the ship to land. On Aug. 18, the company announced that those teams had successfully towed the ship to just off the coast of Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the eastern Indian Ocean near Indonesia.

“A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase,” the company stated.