SpaceX launched the 15th flight of its Starship spacecraft from ​Texas on Friday on a mission the company hopes will be the first round-trip rocket voyage into orbit and back to the very spot where it left Earth, a ‌key test of Elon Musk's bid to build a fully reusable rocket system. Plans call for Starship's uncrewed upper-stage vessel to re-enter the atmosphere after nearly a day in orbit and return to its launch tower on Saturday for an engine-controlled touchdown assisted by the giant mechanical arms of a pioneering catch-landing mechanism. SpaceX had intended to use the same return-flight and "chopstick"-arm technology to recover Starship's lower-stage booster rocket shortly after the two parts of the spacecraft separated within minutes of ​the launch. But the Super Heavy booster, for reasons not immediately clear, was diverted from its return flight path to the Gulf of Mexico and momentarily hovered aloft before exploding a short distance ​over the sea surface. SpaceX mission controllers hoped to have better luck in steering Starship's upper stage back to home base at the end of its ⁠flight. The vehicle reached orbit about 27 minutes after launch, SpaceX said. Key test of reusability Bringing the top portion of the spacecraft intact back to the platform where it was launched would ​mark a breakthrough in the ambitions of Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, to reduce spaceflight costs by developing a fully recyclable rocket system. The combined vehicle, consisting of the main Starship cargo-and-crew vessel perched ​atop its Super Heavy booster rocket and standing 40 stories high, roared off its launch pad from SpaceX's South Texas Starbase complex along the gulf near Brownsville. The flight marked Starship's 15th test flight since 2023 and the second to deliver a batch of operational Starlink satellites to orbit. SpaceX reported that all 26 were released within the first two hours of Friday's flight. That makes the mission both a revenue-generating endeavor for SpaceX's satellite-connectivity business and a high-stakes test for a ​rocket ship still under development. Musk's space and AI business sees Starship as key to expanding its network of Starlink internet satellites and deploying a future swarm of orbital AI data-processing centers dubbed Starmind as the company positions itself as a ​high-tech infrastructure provider. SpaceX last launched Starship in September, taking the rocket and a payload of satellites to orbit for the first time despite some rocket engines malfunctioning in mid-flight. That mission, planned to last 10 hours, ended after ‌roughly three ⁠hours with an upper stage splashing down intact into the Pacific Ocean before bursting into flames. Return-flight and recovery plan On flight 15, plans call for Starship's upper stage to re-enter Earth's atmosphere after roughly 22 hours in orbit and soar back to its Texas launch tower, then make an engine-controlled final descent into the embrace of double robot arms designed to clasp the vehicle as it hovers over the launchpad. Read More: SpaceX to attempt first Starship spacecraft recovery on land in 15th flight If successful, it will mark the first ever round-trip flight of a vertically launched spacecraft into orbit and back to its precise point of departure. SpaceX routinely recovers the booster stages of its workhorse ​Falcon 9 rockets by flying them back to ​separate landing pads or via a floating platform ⁠at sea. And Starship's lower-stage Super Heavy booster has been recovered on three previous test flights using the launch-tower catching system, most recently in March 2025. It was not immediately clear why Friday's attempt at a fourth booster catch went awry. The Starship upper stage was expected to descend from space after completing 14 ​orbits around Earth, setting up its debut catch landing for Saturday afternoon. Musk has said he expects to achieve a pace of weekly Starship launches ​by the first half ⁠of 2027. NASA has helped fund Starship's development with roughly $3.2 billion since selecting the rocket ship in 2021 to serve as a lunar lander for its astronauts under the multibillion-dollar Artemis moon program. SpaceX has put at least $15 billion of its own funds into the rocket's development. NASA and SpaceX expect Starship to land humans on the moon by 2028, though some major test objectives remain that analysts and industry engineers believe will delay that timeline. Those ⁠milestones include ​demonstrating complex fuel transfers between Starship tanker rockets in orbit, a critical process that will enable Starship to travel beyond ​Earth's orbit to the moon. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is also developing a moon lander for NASA under the Artemis program. Blue Moon is poised to join Starship and another spacecraft, NASA's Orion capsule, in Earth's orbit next year for Artemis ​III, a docking test mission before NASA's planned moon landings begin with Artemis IV.