Starship Tower Catch Delayed as Lunar Landing Deadline Looms

There will be no tower catch of Starship and Super Heavy at Starbase in Texas on the 14th flight as Elon Musk had earlier hoped. The plan had been to place Starship in orbit and bring it back to its launch site after flying over Mexico. There has been talk of the launch taking place at the end of the month.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught. First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the

Dustin @r0ck3t23

Elon Musk admitted he is not sure this one is possible. Musk: “This absorbs more of my mental energy than probably any other single thing. But it is so preposterously difficult that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.” He does not talk like this.

5:10 AM · Aug 20, 2026 · 522K Views

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“Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months. If there had been a tower out to see where we practice landing the ship, it would have been caught,” Musk wrote. “First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next year. That will be a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars.”

The idea seems to be to catch Starship possibly in October or November and then reuse it in December or January. That’s a tight schedule that depends upon what sort of shape Starship is in after making an orbit of the Earth and landing back at Starbase.

Musk is notoriously optimistic when it comes to schedules. So, what does the Elon Time Converter say about a reflight of Starship in four or five months?

So one year from now. Mid- to late August 2027. The one-year estimate is the same for four months. Hopefully it’s not that long. SpaceX owes NASA a Starship-derived lander to take Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028. And the clock is ticking.