Ship 40 has made it home. The Starship upper stage that launched on July 24, 2026, atop Super Heavy Booster 20 on the program’s 13th test flight is now standing upright inside the Megabay at Starbase. SpaceX says it is the first Starship upper stage to come back to its launch site after flying in space.
Twenty-four days at sea
After reentry the ship came down in the Indian Ocean and, remarkably, stayed mostly intact on the surface. SpaceX sent a recovery team to tow the 171-foot (52-meter) vehicle through rough seas for 24 days. Elon Musk had voiced doubts at the time that the effort would work. It did. The ship reached waters off Australia’s Christmas Island in August 2026, where engineers inspected it and took heat shield samples from its belly.
Home by barge and road
The next leg was aboard Forte, a semi-submersible transport vessel. Forte docked at the Port of Brownsville on October 7, 2026. From there the ship went overland to Starbase, was positioned outside the Megabay for reorientation, and was then lifted vertical and moved inside. It now stands beside three newer ships still being assembled.
SpaceX described the trip as one across air, space and sea. The company has so far recovered three Super Heavy boosters using the mechanical arms on its launch tower, but no upper stage until now.
What the hardware can tell them
The detail that matters is the condition of the parts. In a post, SpaceX said the ship “will provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more.” Engineers rarely get to examine hardware that has been through reentry and then floated for weeks, and what they learn feeds the systems needed to bring an upper stage back to the tower.
Flight 15 may try exactly that. If the returning ship meets the safety requirements, SpaceX could attempt a catch with the arms used on boosters. “We’re going to try to catch the ship, which is a super big deal,” Musk said in an interview. “If we do so, that’ll be the first time that there’s been full recovery of an orbital class rocket.” He put the flight about four to six weeks out and guessed it “probably launches a little bit before Thanksgiving,” blaming the delay on improvements made to the rocket between every flight. After that, he said, the next big milestone would be reflying both booster and ship, on a Flight 16 where “all parts of an orbital rocket are reflown.”
