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SpaceX Starship Flight 15 live updates: Starship heat shield looks good for landing attempt today
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SpaceX succesfully launched its Starship Flight 15 mission on Friday, Nov. 13, at 5:47 p.m. EDT (2247 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. Starship Flight 15 will attempt to land its Ship upper stage for the first time, but did abort a landing pad catch of its Super Heavy Booster. It will be the first-ever recovery of an orbital Starship upper stage, if successful. See launch video above and live views from SpaceX.
Follow our Starship Flight 15 coverage here as SpaceX completes its final prelaunch work for the launch, which also deployed 26 new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit.
Flight 15 landing livestream | Flight 15 launch video | SpaceX | Starship
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Good morning and happy Saturday, Space Fans! Today is Flight Day 2 for SpaceX's Starship Flight 15 test flight and SpaceX reports that its Ship 42 spacecraft is in good health as we near the 14-hour mark of its 22.5-hour test flight.
About 7 hours into the mission, SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot confirmed that flight controllers gave the go-ahead to forgo an early return window for a splashdown off the coast of Chile and proceed for the full 14-orbit flight. Starship is on track for a landing attempt, its first-ever from orbit, today (Nov. 14) at 4:20 p.m. EST (2120 GMT). Space.com's livestream of SpaceX's Starship Flight 15 landing will begin at 2 p.m. EST and you can see it at the top of this page.
"Starship's going to stay in space. We are one step closer to an eventual return to launch site," Huot said in the update. "So that's great news."
Huot also reported that Starship's tile-covered heat shield appears in good shape for today's landing attempt. SpaceX used long-range ground-based cameras and cameras on some of the 26 Starlink satellites the Ship deployed to check its heat shield after liftoff.