SpaceX Is About to Attempt Something Never Done Before with Starship Flight 14!

What will you see when Starship Flight 14 takes off? A Starship catch? A booster catch? Or anything else? In fact, immediately after Starship Flight 13, Elon Musk confidently declared that SpaceX would attempt to catch Starship. An attempt that is the final piece of full reusability and something no one has ever done before. But is that really all Flight 14 has in store? Honestly, a recently released official document has completely changed the picture. And what it reveals truly surprises you. On August 11th, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC, Flight 14 launches from Starbase, Texas, and the first stage booster will return to launch site. Yeah, it's about a booster catch, not a ship catch. Plenty of people are going to be skeptical here. I was too. Same suspicion that the ship catch we've all been waiting for just got quietly cancelled. Have you ever stopped to think that SpaceX might try both of these aerial ballets on the same flight? Because what's actually in that FCC filing is a long way from what you probably think. First, the main point of the filing isn't the landing at all. SpaceX is asking for additional frequency in the 2200 to 2290 MHz band. That's the band that carries telemetry from the rocket down to the ground during flight. And it isn't SpaceX's band. It's shared with the government, the government holds priority, and it's the same band the US Air Force Satellite Network and NASA's tracking systems use every single day. The law requires private operators to coordinate before every launch, which is why the filing includes a line saying orbital data will go straight to the spectrum regulator, to the Air Force, and to NASA. Second, this filing doesn't replace the ship catch. It sits next to it. Back on June 8th, SpaceX filed a separate request covering what they called the Starship Orbital Return Demo on a different set of frequencies, valid through the end of December. That one is the ship. The August 11th filing calls its subject the suborbital booster. Two filings, two stages, two recoveries on one flight. And compare the wording. Earlier filings hedged. The booster would either return to the launch site or perform a water landing. This one doesn't hedge. Now, a filing is a statement of intent, not a contract. SpaceX can still wave a catch off in flight, and they've done it before, but it's the strongest signal anyone outside the company has, and it's pointing at a booster catch. Which raises the real question. Based on what Booster 20 actually did on Flight 13, has SpaceX earned enough confidence to try a super heavy catch? Flight 13 separated, flipped, and burned back to turn itself around. For the final phase, it needed to relight 13 of its 33 engines to break. 13 was the number it needed. 10 was the number that lit. Then 5 more shut down. By the time it hit the water, roughly 5 engines were still burning. SpaceX's own host admitted it live on the webcast. We were planning for that initial landing burn. We were targeting a softer splashdown, and as you saw, it came in with quite a bit of velocity. The camera cut at impact. That's two in a row. Two months earlier, on the first flight of the V3 generation, the booster didn't light enough engines for the flip, burned partially, shut down early, then tried to relight for the landing phase and slammed into the gulf. The FAA opened an investigation. The findings listed two most likely causes. Heat affecting propulsion system components during launch and an incorrect configuration in the engine alerting system. SpaceX came back with four corrective actions. Four corrective actions. Two months later, the next booster failed in exactly the same phase. Two failures, but two different mechanisms. The first on the flip, the second on the landing burn. Technically, that's the less bad news, because it means there's no single underlying design flaw quietly killing the whole hardware line, but it also means every time you patch one hole, another one opens up. And the root cause of that second failure, as of today, SpaceX still hasn't published it. A super heavy coming home is a steel tube over 70 m tall, essentially empty, falling. No landing legs, no parachutes. The only thing holding it up is thrust, and that thrust only exists for the last few dozen seconds. There's no plan B, it can't go around again. The Raptor relight sequence is genuinely complicated, and you don't need to follow it. All you need to know is this. Every engine that doesn't light is a chunk of braking force gone, and the ones still running have to make up for it. Lose three and the rest can carry it. Lose eight and they can't. That's why you test this thing over water, fail out at sea and you get a column of spray and a pile of data. Nothing on the ground gets touched. On top of that, Starbase right now has exactly one usable tower. Pad 1, the old pad where the first 11 flights went from, is still having its flame trench finished and hasn't even had the OLM installed yet. Basically, the giant chair super heavy sits on before launch. I believe that it may not be ready until around the summer of 2027. That's nearly a year away. So if they go for a booster catch this time, you have to admit it's fairly risky. And that's the scenario where only one vehicle is landing. What happens if both come home? If you want to follow this all the way to the moment it happens, hit subscribe, because this next part is the part I'm not sure about. The ground sequence is where it gets genuinely nerve-wracking. The booster comes back around seven minutes in, the arms catch it, lower it onto the mount, and the water system cools the engine bay. After a flight, that section is too hot to move anywhere. It has to stand there and cool down, like a cast iron pan you just finished frying in. Then it has to be lifted off the mount, set onto a transport stand and towed back to the factory. Lifted with what? With that same pair of arms. One set of arms, three separate jobs. All before the ship gets back. Whether any of that is feasible comes down to a single number, the gap between the booster hitting the tower and the ship hitting the tower. On previous flights, that gap was under an hour. On Flight 5, the booster was caught at seven minutes and the ship splashed down at 65. 58 minutes. 58 minutes to catch, cool, lift off, clear the tower, and then catch something else screaming in from orbital velocity. I don't believe anyone can do that. But Flight 14 isn't like the flights before it. It's the first orbital mission. Tracking sources suggest it could run for hours, possibly as long as 48, depending on how many orbits before deorbit. And if they use the flight to check on propellant tank behavior, that wouldn't be surprising either, because between now and the end of the year, these flights are going to hold a lot of surprises. On the Q2 earnings call, Musk put a number on where he thinks this all goes. Well over a million tons to orbit per year, and eventually maybe 10 million. For scale, SpaceX reported delivering 1,041 tons in the first half of this year, and by Musk's own estimate, the rest of the world manages around 300. None of that happens without full reuse. So SpaceX is going to have to take risks on this flight to get there sooner, and to turn Starship into the greatest vehicle of the 21st century. That's why, personally, I think Flight 14 goes for both Booster 21 and Ship 41. So what do you think? One catch or two? Drop a one or a two in the comments. Nobody gets to pick the order. The booster separates at three minutes and comes straight down. The ship keeps climbing to orbit. The booster always arrives first and always by hours. That's physics, not a decision. However, the real choice sits somewhere else. SpaceX could absolutely drop the booster into the gulf for a third time like the last two. Nobody would blame them. Before this FCC filing showed up, analysts figured that's exactly what would happen. One more ocean landing until they've nailed down the cause, and no stacking two catches onto a single flight with zero precedent. The filing says otherwise. And because the booster has to come home first, it becomes the gate. Think about it this way. Seven minutes in, the booster comes charging into the tower. If it drifts off, if an arm snaps, if it detonates inside the tower, then the ship, still up there somewhere on orbit, has nowhere to come home to. It diverts to the ocean. The first ship catch in history, the thing the whole industry is waiting for, the thing Musk went and announced to shareholders, gets cancelled by a booster that has now failed to land twice in a row. That's what the FCC filing actually reveals. SpaceX just put their biggest milestone behind a door they've never once managed to open with this generation of hardware. From the outside, we don't know why. Maybe they've already found the Flight 13 cause and haven't published it. Maybe they figure that if they're accepting the risk of a catch over land anyway, adding the booster doesn't move the needle much. Or maybe it's simply that they need that booster for the next flight, and a hull fished out of the Gulf isn't flying again. I'm not convinced by the second explanation. The risk here doesn't add. It multiplies, because both vehicles go through the same tower. To be fair, the safer path does exist. Blue Origin is doing exactly that with landing legs on the new Glenn booster. Legs are the boring answer, and the boring answer works. SpaceX has turned it down for a reason they've stated publicly since 2024. Strip the mass of landing legs off both stages, let the tower do the final braking, and your payload margin improves dramatically. And because the same arms that lift the rocket onto the mount are the arms that catch it, the booster can go straight back onto the mount, and the ship straight back on top. The entire flight rhythm of this program lives inside that one sentence. It's why they won't bolt on legs, and it's why they won't drop the booster into the Gulf one more time. There's one more party that hasn't spoken up. The FAA has already approved a return corridor running through northern Mexico and south Texas back to Starbase, and it's reviewing a northern corridor that would affect airspace stretching roughly 1,900 miles across six states. That late August window doesn't hinge on booster 21. It hinges on paperwork. So, wrapping up. The risk that just moved is infrastructure risk. Before, a booster failure meant losing a booster. From flight 14 on, a booster failure could mean losing the pad, losing the ship catch with it, and losing the flight cadence for the entire following year. And the risk that hasn't moved is engine risk. The last time SpaceX caught a Super Heavy was March 2025, 17 months ago, and a generation of hardware ago. Every V3 booster since has ended in the water. The FCC filing isn't technical evidence. It's a statement of intent, which is why two tests will tell us how serious they are. Booster 21's static fire and the FAA's license modification for that return corridor. If that static fire tests the relight sequence instead of the standard profile, they found what killed the last two. The paperwork will show up first, and it'll show up as a public document, not a post. From what the trackers around Starbase can see, Booster 21 is standing in Megabay 1 right now. It passed cryo testing back in July, and it's getting its engines installed, while crews put up scaffolding on the OLM and service the booster hold-down clamps. Static fire is expected late next week. Ship 41 is on the same track. Raptor's going in, then a rollout to Massey's. Nobody has caught a rocket with a tower in 17 months. Late this month, SpaceX intends to catch two, and the second one only comes home if the first one lands where it's supposed to.