Starship Flight 15 Reached Orbit After the Booster Catch Was Aborted and the Booster Exploded

SpaceX's Starship lifted off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, at 16:47 local time on Friday on Flight 15, the first test that had hoped to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Ship in the launch tower's mechanical arms, the BBC reported. A "go" was initially given for a booster catch about six and a half minutes after launch, but the booster aborted automatically, diverted toward the ocean, hovered above the water and exploded. During the livestream a SpaceX spokesperson said, "Safety is always the number one priority and we're still testing out things that we haven't done before on these vehicles, and so we are prioritising making sure that we can perform each manoeuvre safely." The 124-meter, or 407-foot, rocket is the 15th Starship test flight.

The Ship continued to orbit, deployed 26 satellites for the Starlink constellation, and was due to return to Earth at about 15:15 local time, or 21:15 GMT, on Saturday after 14 orbits and 22.5 hours aloft. SpaceX said before the flight that it would decide whether to try to catch the Ship only after assessing the vehicle in space, and that if problems were detected the stage could be brought down in the ocean instead. The BBC account, published while the Ship was still aloft, did not report a completed Ship catch. SpaceX has caught a Super Heavy booster on three earlier test flights, but the upper stage, which reached orbit for the first time in September, has never been grabbed by the "chopsticks."

Fully reusable upper and lower stages remain the company's longer-term goal, because reuse is how Falcon 9, which first landed a booster in 2015 and now flies more than 100 times a year, cut launch costs. Flight 15's booster abort means that part of the double-catch plan did not happen. Whether the Ship is caught later on Saturday is a separate decision that had not been reported as completed in the BBC dispatch used for this account, and this story does not treat a landing or a catch as a fact.

The verified news, as of the BBC report, is a Friday liftoff, an aborted booster catch, an explosion over the sea, a 26-satellite deployment, and a planned Saturday return with the catch still optional. It is not a finished double-catch, and it is not a repeat of earlier preview stories that only described the attempt before launch.