At Tuesday's third quarter earnings report, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company would attempt to catch both Starship and its Super Heavy booster on the next flight, which Aviation Week and SpaceNews report is targeted to launch in November, pending regulatory approval.

If successful, Musk said it would be the first time in history that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered.

The plan is for the Super Heavy booster to return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower's mechanical "chopstick" arms, with the Starship upper stage flying back to the site as well.

The Verge quotes Musk calling the potential achievement "a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness."

Starship stands roughly 120 meters (about 400 feet) tall with a 9-meter diameter, powered by Raptor engines burning liquid methane and liquid oxygen, and was designed from the start for mid-air tower catches.

Musk acknowledged the risk on the earnings call. "Success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight," he said, according to The Verge.

"And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year and then accelerating next year."

The caution is grounded in the most recent mission: one Raptor engine shut down prematurely during ascent on the last launch, and SpaceX cut the planned 10-hour, 6-orbit mission short after about 3 hours and 2 orbits, with the booster splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and the upper stage ending in a fiery Pacific splashdown — neither piece recovered.

Per BASENOR's review of SpaceX's Q3 highlights, each V3 satellite is designed for 1 Tbps of downlink and 160 Gbps of uplink, and the batch represents roughly 10 times the downlink capacity of a comparable Falcon 9 Starlink launch.

Neither stage was recovered on that flight; the priority was proving payload delivery. Reusability is the remaining proof point.

The economics are the point. BASENOR reports Starship can carry up to 60 Starlink V3 satellites per mission, and that combined with booster recovery the cost per unit of added network capacity would drop in a way no other launch vehicle can match.

SpaceX's Q3 2026 revenue was $14.6 billion, up 161% year-over-year, per the company's highlights cited by BASENOR.

space.com notes SpaceX plans to sunset Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy in the coming years in favor of Starship — a rocket that flew 165 times in 2025, roughly as often as the rest of the world's orbital launchers combined, with nearly three-quarters of those flights serving Starlink.

The next flight test is currently targeted for November, with both SpaceNews and Aviation Week reporting the full two-stage recovery attempt is on the manifest, pending regulatory approval.

If the catch fails, Musk says the company has a steady cadence of Starship flight attempts through the end of the year, accelerating into 2027.

Watchers should also keep an eye on the Starlink V3 rollout: more V3 satellites in orbit means more capacity in congested markets and expanded coverage in underserved regions, making the recovery milestone the key unlock for routine constellation-building at scale.