Elon Musk says SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) is closing in on the milestone that would transform its economics: catching Starship’s upper stage and flying it again.
Traders who have watched his deadlines slip for years are not so sure.
“Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months,” Musk wrote on X on Wednesday. The first reflight, he added, would come “either end of this year or early next.”
A successful catch and reflight would demonstrate the ship can be reused, moving SpaceX toward the fully reusable rocket Musk says could cut the cost of reaching orbit a hundredfold. “That will be a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars,” he wrote.
Musk’s Timeline Keeps Moving
The post responded to a resurfaced clip from The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in December 2021, where Musk told Joanna Stern that full reusability was “so preposterously difficult that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.”
“I don’t know if we’ll be there in 2022. I hope so,” he said at the time.
The target has kept receding. In February 2025, Musk predicted Starship would likely become fully reusable that year.
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On this month’s earnings call, he said SpaceX hoped to attempt an upper-stage catch on its next flight, tentatively set for late August, if regulators approved. His latest comments suggest that timetable may have slipped by several months.
Why Catching The Ship Is So Hard
SpaceX has caught its Super Heavy booster three times since October 2024, but recovering the upper stage is more difficult. The spacecraft must carry cargo into orbit, survive the intense heat of reentry and retain enough fuel to land precisely in the tower’s mechanical arms.
Flight 13 brought real progress in July with an intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean, but landing at sea is not the same as returning to the pad, being caught and flying again.
Traders Are Not Convinced
Musk floated a next-flight catch only weeks ago, yet a Flight 14 contract gives a ship catch just 3% odds. There’s a 49% chance the mission takes place before Sept. 15, and a 93% chance by Sept. 30.
Traders give a booster catch just a 12% chance because SpaceX plans to land it in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the tower free to catch the ship, Reuters reported.
A separate Polymarket contract gives SpaceX a 42% chance of declaring the upper stage fully reusable before 2027, down 15 percentage points from the 57% reported by Benzinga on Aug. 10.
A reusable Starship could lower launch costs and speed deployment of larger Starlink V3 satellites, which Musk says offer 10 times the broadband capacity of current models. That makes Starship’s pace a financial question for SPCX investors, not just an engineering one.
Shares were down approximately 3% Thursday morning.
Image: Shutterstock
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