What is a Starship catch?

About seven minutes after liftoff, the Super Heavy booster comes back to Starbase, slows down with a landing burn and hovers beside the launch tower. Two long steel arms on the tower, nicknamed the chopsticks, swing shut around it and take its weight. On the first boosters the arms held separate catch points near the top; on Version 3 boosters, the grid fins themselves are the catch points.

No legs, no landing pad. The tower that held the rocket before launch is also what it comes home to.

Source: Wikipedia

Landing legs are weight that the booster carries up on every flight and only uses for a few seconds at the end. Leaving them off means more of the rocket's lift goes to its payload.

A booster caught on the tower is also already where it needs to be to fly again. The same arms can lower it back onto the launch mount, with no trip back from a landing zone. That is our reading of the design, not a figure SpaceX has published.

Flight 5 on October 13, 2024 was the first: the booster was caught on its first try. On Flight 6, on November 19, 2024, automated health checks on the tower called the catch off, and the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico instead. Flights 7 and 8, on January 16 and March 6, 2025, were caught again, even though both ships were lost later in those flights.

Flights 9, 10 and 11 in 2025 sent the booster into the Gulf on purpose to test new descent and landing burns, and the three Version 3 boosters that flew in 2026 also ended offshore. As of October 26, 2026, three Super Heavy boosters have been caught, all of them the earlier design. No Version 3 booster has been caught yet.

Source: Space.com

Automated health checks on the tower's critical hardware have to pass before the booster is sent to the arms. On Flight 6 they didn't, so the booster flew a preplanned diversion and splashed down softly in the Gulf instead. A called-off catch is a safety rule working, not a failure.

Source: Astronomy

Not yet. Every Starship upper stage so far has ended in the sea or been lost on the way. The ship's return is much harder than the booster's: it comes back from orbital speed, so it has to survive reentry, then flip from falling belly first to a tail-first burn in the last seconds before reaching the arms.

Elon Musk has said SpaceX is working toward catching the ship, and news reports point to Flight 15, no earlier than November 8, 2026, as a possible first try at catching both the booster and the ship. SpaceX hasn't confirmed it.

Source: NASASpaceflight

A catch happens at Starbase in South Texas, about seven minutes after liftoff, going by Flight 14's published timeline. South Padre Island and Port Isabel, about 5 miles (8 km) from the pads, are the closest public places to watch. Our Starbase guide has the spots, the closures and what to bring.