SpaceX plans to launch Starship on Friday, November 13, then attempt to land the rocket's upper stage 22.5 hours later, on Saturday afternoon local time at Starbase, Texas.
No orbital rocket has ever been fully recovered with the intent to reuse all of its components. That is the bar Starship is trying to clear. SpaceX's Falcon 9 already reuses its first stage, but its upper stage is discarded after each flight. Starship is designed to bring back both halves. The upper stage is the harder half, since it has to return from much higher speeds than the booster does. A gap of 22.5 hours between launch and landing also suggests that stage will spend most of a day in flight before it comes down.
The same weekend brings a quieter milestone. Rocket Lab's Electron is due to lift off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand on November 14 at 5:30 UTC, NASASpaceflight.com reported. It will be the 100th Electron mission. The small rocket first flew in 2017, which works out to 100 launches in roughly nine years.
The two stories sit at opposite ends of the launch business. Electron shows what a small vehicle can do by flying again and again. Starship is trying to show that the reusability SpaceX has built into Falcon 9's first stage can extend to an entire rocket.