---
title: "On an Earnings Call in Texas, SpaceX Promises to Catch Both Halves of Starship"
description: "Musk says Flight 15 will try to recover booster and ship next month, with weekly launches, a reflown upper stage and a fuel test due in 2027"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-21T16:46:19Z
modified: 2026-10-22T00:34:09Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/on-an-earnings-call-in-texas-spacex-promises-to-catch-both-h-4006bb
language: en
tags: ["spacex", "starship", "reusability", "starlink", "artemis", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# On an Earnings Call in Texas, SpaceX Promises to Catch Both Halves of Starship

*Musk says Flight 15 will try to recover booster and ship next month, with weekly launches, a reflown upper stage and a fuel test due in 2027*

By Jan Sokol · October 21, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/on-an-earnings-call-in-texas-spacex-promises-to-catch-both-h-4006bb

## In brief

- SpaceX said on its Oct. 20 earnings call that Starship Flight 15, expected next month, will try to catch both the booster and the ship
- Shotwell cited constructive FAA engagement and expects the Flight 15 license to include tower catches for both stages
- SpaceX plans to refly a Starship upper stage and attempt a ship-to-ship refueling test early in 2027
- Musk expects weekly Starship launches in the first half of 2027 and twice-weekly or faster later in the year
- Starlink throttling for Ukraine was not discussed on the call by executives or analysts

The setting was a factory in Bastrop, Texas, where Starlink satellites are built and where, the company says, a future production line for something called Starmind will stand. The date was Tuesday, October 20. The occasion was an earnings call, the ritual in which a corporation tells the people who own pieces of it that the future is on schedule. SpaceX had numbers to recite: [CNBC reported](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/20/spacex-spcx-earnings-live-updates-q3-2026html.html) third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion, against the $12.72 billion analysts had expected. In between the numbers came a promise about a rocket.

[As Eric Berger reported for *Ars Technica*](https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/spacex-will-attempt-to-reach-weekly-starship-launches-by-early-2027/), SpaceX will try on Starship’s next flight to do what no one has done with an orbital vehicle. It also laid out a 2027 crowded with firsts: a reflown upper stage, a refueling in orbit, and launches every week.

## Two catches

Elon Musk put it plainly. “For Flight 15, which we expect to happen next month, we’re going to attempt to catch both the booster and the ship,” he said, according to the [call transcript](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/10/20/spacex-spcx-q3-2026-earnings-call-transcript/). If it works, he said, “it will be the first time that an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered.” Then came a hedge, rare from him: “success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I’d say it’s more likely than not that this succeeds next flight.”

![Two cream-colored rocket sections hover above a dark launch tower with outstretched mechanical arms against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/8715bf34535ea9cde60fb5bd55b777b3e43875e0.webp)

Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, spoke for the side of the business that deals with Washington. “We have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA,” she said, adding that SpaceX expects the Flight 15 license to cover a return to the launch site and a tower catch for both stages. The regulator is already [weighing as many as 456 Starship flights a year](https://rews.cc/a/faa-weighs-456-starship-flights-a-year-as-the-backup-rockets-0e020f). The relationship between the company and the agency that licenses it has been strained before. On Tuesday it was described as friendly.

The confidence rests on Flight 14, which in the last week of the quarter [reached orbit for the first time](https://rews.cc/a/spacex-starship-reaches-orbit-for-the-first-time-on-its-14th-41d6e2) and released working Starlink V3 satellites. Musk said that flight delivered 26 terabits per second of Starlink bandwidth, “equivalent to 10 Falcon 9 launches”, and that the vehicle “was about maybe half loaded.”

## Fuel in the void

Beyond the catch, Shotwell said SpaceX would try to refly a Starship upper stage early next year, and would try the long-delayed transfer of propellant from one Starship to another, also early in 2027. On paper it is one line among many. For NASA it holds up the Moon.

![A cylindrical spacecraft connects to a cratered moon by a yellow hose that is broken near the moon, with a yellow droplet below the break.](https://rews.cc/img/6fd01e6378e5650918b71bb9a0665a13af2a3ac3.webp)

Nobody has moved propellant in orbit on this scale. SpaceX does not yet know how efficiently liquid oxygen and methane can be pumped from one ship to another, or how fast they will boil away while they wait in space. Those two unknowns decide how many launches a single Starship landing on the Moon will need for the Artemis program. For now the American return to the lunar surface depends on a number nobody has measured.

## Like an airplane

Then Musk gave the timetable. Berger notes that he “often offers hyper-optimistic timeframes,” and this one was no exception. Ars reported that he expects Starship to fly weekly in the first half of 2027 and twice a week in the second half. In the transcript the second target is looser: “twice weekly or maybe even more frequently than that by the end of next year.”

> “The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve rapid and complete reusability. At first there will be a little bit of refurbishment that’s needed between each flight, and we’ll iron out the need for any refurbishment such that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again, just like an airplane.”

![A cream and navy rocket with a yellow exhaust sits on an oval segmented track against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/0d53a1f72db17d362c7456447f20e0796c9dfb1c.webp)

That is the vision. No orbital rocket has ever been made completely reusable, and Berger expects the engineers to run into serious obstacles before they come near it, though he thinks they will probably get close in time. Every executive who builds machines makes the airplane comparison sooner or later. Airplanes took decades to become ordinary, and a great many people paid for that along the way.

## Its own cargo

For now the rocket will mostly carry the company’s own payloads. In 2027 Starship is to keep launching Starlink V3 satellites, along with the second generation of the “mobile” satellites that connect directly to phones, and prototypes of Starmind, the company’s orbital data centers. Shotwell said people will need “a few hundred V3 satellites” in orbit “to really feel the impact,” and that she believes SpaceX “can achieve that by mid next year.”

The rocket’s main customer, then, is the company that builds it. That is the condition SpaceX needs before it can [retire Falcon 9 and Dragon](https://rews.cc/a/spacex-moves-to-retire-falcon-9-and-dragon-after-starship-re-6f6929), the machines that made it what it is. If Flight 14, half loaded, did the work of ten Falcon 9 launches, the old workhorse has little left to argue with.

## What nobody raised

One subject never came up. Musk and Shotwell did not mention the controversial throttling of Starlink service to Ukraine in its war with Russia, and none of the financial analysts asked. On a call about bandwidth and terabits, a war where bandwidth is a weapon did not count as a question.

Flight 15 is expected next month.