SpaceX will try for 1st Starship tower catch 'in a few months,' Elon Musk says

We'll have to wait a bit longer for a highly anticipated Starship milestone, it appears.

On Aug.

4, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company aimed to attempt the first-ever catch of Starship's upper stage on the vehicle's next test flight , which is tentatively targeted for late August.

But that doesn't seem to be in the cards anymore.

"Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months," Musk said early this morning (Aug.

20) via X , the social media platform he bought in 2022.

Starship's Ship upper stage floats in the Indian Ocean after surviving the vehicle's Flight 13, which launched on July 24, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX via X) SpaceX has high hopes for Starship , the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

It consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Rapid reuse will be enabled by landings directly on the launch mount, with the aid of the launch tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX has already pulled off such chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of Starship's 13 suborbital test flights to date.

And two of those missions featured a used Super Heavy: Flight 9 used the same booster as Flight 7, and Flight 11 employed the one from Flight 8.

SpaceX has not yet tried to catch Ship, however, because it's a tougher ask: The upper stage comes back down to Earth from much greater heights, and at much higher speeds, than Super Heavy.

But the company has made progress toward this goal recently.