SpaceX finally Catching Both Starship and Booster in mid-air! Flight 13 will be Crazy...
SpaceX finally Catching Both Starship and Booster in mid-air! Flight 13 will be Crazy...
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SpaceX finally Catching Both Starship and Booster in mid-air! Flight 13 will be Crazy...
Catching the Starship upper stage with Mechazilla's chopsticks is one of the major milestones SpaceX is pushing hard to achieve in 2026. This isn’t just about proving full reusability, it’s a critical step toward orbital refueling, the technology that could accelerate Starship HLS missions to the Moon.
So the big question is: when will SpaceX actually attempt to catch the Ship? Could it happen as early as Flight 12?
Let’s break it all down in today’s episode of Alpha Tech.
SpaceX finally Catching Both Starship and Booster in mid-air! Flight 13 will be Crazy...
Here we are on the final day of 2025, a remarkable year in which SpaceX hit an impressive number of milestones in the Starship program. Despite flying only five missions in total, they successfully deployed dummy Starlink payloads twice, and achieved two successful Super Heavy landings caught by Mechazilla.
In fact, SpaceX could have completed several more booster catches, but because they reused boosters twice, they opted for ocean splashdowns instead, prioritizing the safety of the launch tower.
SpaceX finally Catching Both Starship and Booster in mid-air! Flight 13 will be Crazy...
Overall, most of the progress this year has centered on Super Heavy. But what about Starship itself? It has yet to be caught by the tower’s chopsticks, and it has never been reused even once. So why is that?
The answer is pretty simple: Starship still isn’t stable enough. From Flight 7 through Flight 9, SpaceX went through three consecutive Ship failures, with the vehicle breaking apart mid-flight. Only the last two missions managed to get Starship through the spaceflight phase successfully, but even then, both vehicles returned in a weakened state due to heat shield issues. Because of that, SpaceX wasn’t willing to take the risk of attempting a catch, not even once.
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