How does starship land?

After separating about two and a half minutes into flight, Super Heavy fires a subset of its engines to reverse course and head back towards the launch site. It falls tail-first through the atmosphere, steered by four grid fins near the top, and lights its centre engines again for a landing burn a few hundred metres above the pad. Instead of legs, it slows to a hover beside the launch tower and lowers itself between two mechanical arms, which close on small pins below the grid fins. SpaceX first caught a booster on the fifth test flight, on 13 October 2024, and repeated the manoeuvre on later flights (as of early 2026).

The upper stage faces a harder problem: it returns from orbital speed, so it must shed most of its energy as heat. Thousands of hexagonal heat-shield tiles protect the windward side. Starship descends belly-first, like a skydiver, presenting its widest surface to the airflow to slow down. Two forward and two aft flaps control its attitude and steer the fall. Close to the ground, it swings to vertical, a flip that has to happen in seconds, and reignites Raptor engines to arrive at zero speed. Early prototypes demonstrated this on land in 2021; the orbital-class ships have since performed the full sequence over the Indian Ocean, ending in soft splashdowns rather than tower catches.

SpaceX's approach removes landing legs to save mass and to allow the booster to be restacked on the pad within hours. The plan is for ships to be caught the same way, which requires the vehicle to return exactly to its launch site; ocean demonstrations are the proving ground for that precision. Landing on the Moon or Mars, where no tower exists, will use legs on dedicated variants such as the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis programme.