AI Insight
SpaceX plans to attempt catching both stages of its Starship megarocket during its 15th test flight targeted for next month, which would mark the first time an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered. The company has successfully caught the Super Heavy booster on three previous flights using the launch tower's "chopstick" arms, but has not yet attempted to catch the upper stage (Ship), which travels higher, farther, and faster. SpaceX reported strong Q3 financial performance with $14.6 billion in revenue, primarily driven by its Starlink connectivity services and AI divisions rather than launch operations.
Why it matters
Full reusability of orbital rockets could dramatically reduce spaceflight costs and enable sustained space exploration and Mars settlement. The technology represents a significant departure from traditional rocket recovery methods and could accelerate SpaceX's goal of launching Starship over 10,000 times annually by 2030.
Understand the Science
SpaceX will soon notch a huge spaceflight milestone, if all goes according to plan.
The company will try to catch both stages of its Starship megarocket during the vehicle’s next test flight, which is targeted for next month, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced during SpaceX’s quarter 3 (Q3) earnings call today (Oct. 20).
If SpaceX succeeds, this “will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered,” Musk said. “The only way that we can extend consciousness beyond Earth on a sustained basis is with a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. So this is, I think, a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization and consciousness.”
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall when fully stacked.
As Musk noted, both of its stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will make Mars settlement and other grand exploration feats economically feasible.
Starship’s recovery strategy is different than that for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which are partially reusable. (The latter two rockets have expendable upper stages). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters come back to Earth on landing pads near the launch site or on ships at sea downrange. Super Heavy and Ship, however, will steer themselves directly back to their launch tower, which will capture each vehicle with its “chopstick” arms.
This will allow SpaceX to inspect, refurbish and refly Starship at an accelerated rate, which is a priority for the company: Musk has said he envisions launching Starship more than 10,000 times per year by 2030.
Starship has conducted 14 test flights to date, and SpaceX has pulled off chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of them. The company has not yet tried to catch Ship, which is a more difficult proposition, as the upper stage travels higher, farther and faster than the booster does.
Still, Musk is confident that SpaceX will pull off a Ship catch on the first try. (He did not give a specific target date for Flight 15, saying only that it was expected next month.)
“I’d say it’s more likely than not that this succeeds next flight,” he said. “And if not, we have a steady stream of Starship flight attempts through the end of this year, and and then accelerating next year.”
Success would mean back-to-back Starship flights with huge milestones. On Flight 14, which occurred on Sept. 28, Ship reached orbit for the first time ever. It also deployed 26 of SpaceX’s Starlink Version 3 satellites — the first 26 members of a next-gen broadband constellation in low Earth orbit that will eventually consist of about 100,000 spacecraft.
The Starship Flight 15 preview was something of an aside during today’s call. The event primarily served to announce SpaceX’s financial performance during Q3, the three-month stretch that ended on Sept. 30.
And that performance was strong, company representatives said. SpaceX recorded revenues of $14.6 billion during Q3, an increase of 161% from the $5.6 billion earned during Q3 of 2025. The company had a net income of $4.4 billion during Q3, $5.5 billion better than the result from the same stretch last year, when SpaceX lost $1.1 billion.
Just $1.8 billion of 2026 Q3 revenue came from SpaceX’s launch division. The vast majority was generated by two other segments — connectivity (services provided by its Starlink megaconstellation) and artificial intelligence (or, as the Trump administration has recently rebranded it, “superintelligence”).
SpaceX thinks these latter two segments will continue to boom. That’s why it’s building the infrastructure to support thousands of Starship launches per year — to loft lots of Starlink satellites and AI data centers to Earth orbit. And the company believes that it’s positioned to really start raking in the cash, starting as soon as next year.
“In a nutshell, what this implies for SpaceX annual recurring revenue by the end of ’27 is somewhere between 500 billion [dollars] and a trillion,” Musk said.