An update to yesterday’s post on Starship Flight 15 (linked below). Space.com says the first attempt at a double catch is still scheduled for today, Friday, Nov. 13, from Starbase in South Texas. The 75-minute window still opens at 5:45 p.m. Eastern / 4:45 p.m. Chicago time. As of noon Chicago time, it had not launched yet. SpaceX and Space.com plan to carry the livestream, starting about 30 minutes before liftoff.
The plan is the same one I wrote about yesterday: catch Super Heavy (Booster 22) back at the tower about 6.5 minutes after launch, then bring Ship home for a catch of its own about 22.5 hours later, on Saturday afternoon. What’s new in today’s coverage is the payload and the backup plan. Ship is due to deploy 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, the second batch after Flight 14, in a 42-minute window that starts about 35 minutes after liftoff. And SpaceX will call off a Ship catch if the vehicle has any issues, and steer it to a splashdown in the Pacific, either near Hawaii or off the coast of Chile, instead. Super Heavy has been caught before. A Ship catch, and a full recovery of both stages on one flight, has not.
“If successful, this will mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch system and a breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket,” SpaceX wrote in its Flight 15 mission description.
My take
The window is still today, and “still on as of noon” is not the same as “they already stacked and went.” Weather or a last-minute hold can move it. If they go, this is the test that shows whether catching both stages is a plan or a machine. I’ll be watching the window, and I wrote a separate note about sitting down this afternoon to do that.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
