The moment awaited for years has arrived in Starship

Tonight, SpaceX crossed a threshold it had been aiming for for years. The company captured Starship's upper stage in the air for the first time with the arms of Mechazilla, the launch and capture tower. SpaceX has previously captured Super Heavy first stages with this method, but this is the first time the so-called "chopstick" maneuver has been successfully performed on the Starship vehicle itself.

The vehicle that landed on the tower was Ship 42, which was launched the day before on its 15th test flight. Starship remained in orbit throughout this time, dropping off 26 Starlink V3 satellites and making approximately 14 orbits around the Earth. The capture took place around 00:20 Turkish time.

Through the clouds to the arms of the tower

In the images shared by SpaceX, Starship descends rapidly through the clouds, turns into a vertical position and settles into Mechazilla's open arms with surprising softness. Elon Musk said at the company's third quarter earnings meeting: "Success is not guaranteed in these first flights, but the probability of success in the next flight is higher."

We reported the previous stages of the flight in our news article Starship is in orbit, the hard part begins now.

The first stage could not return to the tower

The flight plan included turret capture of both the Super Heavy V3 first stage and Starship V3, but only the latter materialized. When the guidance and control system detected that the first stage was outside the safe capture area, it aborted the capture and diverted the craft to the backup landing point in the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk explained the reason for this as the first stage has less fuel than required for normal rotation. SpaceX is still investigating why the first stage's landing was canceled.