Author: Bao Yilong, Wall Street Journal

SpaceX successfully caught the upper stage of the Starship in mid-air using a mechanical arm from the launch tower for the first time, marking the first time in global space history that a spacecraft returning from orbit was "caught" and recovered by a tower structure. This also brings Musk's company a significant step closer to the goal of "rapid reuse," which analysts believe is a key component supporting its multi-trillion dollar valuation narrative.

On Sunday, November 15, Beijing time, the upper stage of Starship returned to the atmosphere after completing 14 laps around the Earth and was steadily caught by the giant mechanical arm "Mechazilla" on the launch tower at the Texas Starbase site. The live broadcast showed that more than 5 million people watched this recovery.

For investors, the significance of this success lies in cost. Bernstein analysts wrote in a report to clients before the launch that complete reuse is the "key to achieving high launch frequency and lower orbital insertion costs, both of which are central to the orbital data center network plan," and stated that demonstrating the reusability of Starship is "the most important step" in supporting SpaceX's "multi-trillion dollar valuation."

Citi analysts pointed out in their report on Thursday that the industry has always regarded a 100% reusable rocket as the "Holy Grail" of rocket technology.

Morgan Stanley previously published a research report emphasizing that the market lacks understanding of the potential impact of Starship's rapid reuse. If the boosters and spacecraft are successfully captured, it will not only provide substantive benefits for stock prices but also have greater positive significance for the business itself, significantly reducing the potential market size uncertainty of various core business segments.

However, this time SpaceX only accomplished half of its goal. According to plan, the company was originally set to recover both the Falcon Heavy booster and the upper stage simultaneously, but the booster shut down its engines prematurely during descent, autonomously aborting the recovery attempt and subsequently being directed towards the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, exploding before hitting the water. SpaceX indicated that engineers are investigating the cause.

This time, Starship was the 15th test flight and the most aggressive one: the company attempted to recover both stages of the rocket simultaneously for the first time.

Previously, SpaceX had successfully caught the Falcon Heavy boosters three times, but the attempt on Friday was interrupted during descent due to the premature shutdown of the engines, leading to the booster splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and exploding.

Wall Street Journal mentioned that on the afternoon of November 13 local time in the U.S., Starship completed its fifteenth integrated flight test launch; however, after stage separation, the V3 version of the Falcon Heavy booster Booster 22 failed to return to the launch site as planned, ultimately splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and exploding, missing the opportunity for capture by the launch tower's mechanical arm.

SpaceX has successfully recovered boosters multiple times prior. In the fifth integrated flight test of October 2024, Booster 12 completed its first capture by the launch tower's mechanical arm, and afterwards booster recovery gradually became a routine part of the tests. However, past success does not guarantee that every new generation of boosters will pass smoothly.

The upper stage continued to orbit as planned. Starship released 26 of the latest Starlink V3 satellites during flight, then re-entered the atmosphere, flying at speeds exceeding 26,000 kilometers per hour, with the vehicle reaching temperatures of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit under the protective plasma sheath.

According to media reports, this is the first time since NASA's space shuttle completed its last flight in 2011 that a spacecraft has returned from orbit and been recovered; because the space shuttle is not strictly a rocket, this return of Starship is another "first" for SpaceX.

Musk himself also posted a video of the inspected recovered spacecraft on X.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated on X:

It’s like magic, making more people believe this every day.

NASA's Artemis lunar program relies on Starship technology to transport astronauts and cargo from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back, while Musk hopes to eventually use Starship for Mars missions.

Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Musk, recalled on X that in a meeting in December 2020, Musk proposed and insisted that the mechanical arm of the launch tower could catch the returning Starship, "This is of much greater significance for humanity than most people realize; I will always remember the expressions of the engineers in the Starbase conference room at that moment."

After the failure to recover the booster on Friday, SpaceX's stock price (ticker SPCX) fell by 2% in after-hours trading; entering trading on Monday, the stock price was only 3% higher than the IPO issue price of $135 and had dropped 38% from the historical high of $225.64 set shortly after its listing in June last year.

Pressing market sentiment more is related to AI factors, as the market is concerned that the industry-wide growth of this new technology will slow down. For this reason, the progress of Starship is seen as a key variable affecting valuation: it can both expand the capacity of Starlink and provide a cost pathway for space computing power.

In terms of competitive landscape, Bernstein believes that competitors are still far behind SpaceX. The agency pointed out that SpaceX demonstrated reusability on Falcon 9 as early as 2016, "SpaceX is essentially about ten years ahead of its competitors."

Reports indicate that SpaceX is also the first private company to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit, the first private company to visit the International Space Station, and the first rocket company valued over $1 trillion. Saturday's "chopstick catch of a spacecraft" adds another item to this list.

Returning the spacecraft to the launch tower instead of letting it splash into the sea means that rocket maintenance and re-launch can be completed on the ground without the need for retrieval and rebuild piece by piece. Citi commented that fully reusable rockets are the "Holy Grail" of the industry.

SpaceX's long-term goal is to launch Starship thousands of times a year, while its partially reusable Falcon 9 currently launches hundreds of times a year, handling most of the global orbital cargo transport.

Morgan Stanley believes that capturing the spacecraft body is more difficult than capturing the booster. The booster does not experience the heat stress and mechanical stress of complete orbital re-entry, while the Starship needs to withstand the extreme environment during high-speed re-entry into the atmosphere. If the spacecraft can still be captured by the tower after re-entry, it will be the most critical step in a fully reusable system.

This is also the reason why Morgan Stanley emphasizes the market's underestimation of the importance of this mission. If both captures are successful, it will not only catalyze the stock price in the short term but will also significantly reduce the execution risks of the Starship system in commercialization reuse, Starlink deployment, and future AI computing power expansion.

The commercial value of Starship is first reflected in Starlink. Starlink is currently the profit center for SpaceX, serving over 13 million users in more than 170 countries, running over 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, with an EBITDA of approximately $3.5 billion in the third quarter, up from $1.9 billion in the same period of 2025.

Starship can carry up to 60 Starlink V3 satellites per launch. The V3 is nearly four times the size of the V2 and has a data transfer capacity about ten times that of its predecessor, meaning only Starship can deliver heavier satellites to orbit. In the 14th test flight on September 28, SpaceX had already released 26 V3 satellites.

From a commercial perspective, the progress of Starship reuse directly determines whether SpaceX can further lower launch costs and significantly expand single-launch capability. The quicker and more stable the rocket reuse, the faster the Starlink deployment, and the higher the revenue ceiling for global connectivity and AI infrastructure businesses.

Analysis suggests that the long-term vision is online computing. Musk hopes to build AI data centers in space, possibly starting by the end of 2027, and the reusability of Starship is a prerequisite for lowering the unit orbital insertion cost. He posted on November 4 that "space data centers now look quite attractive"; Bernstein also believes that the bottleneck of orbital data centers is not physical but in the deployment rhythm.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到[email protected]，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。