SpaceX's megarocket, Starship lifted off on its 15th flight from Starbase at 2247 UTC Friday (Nov. 13), and achieved a historic milestone by successfully capturing its upper stage, Ship 42, 22.5 hours after liftoff, with the launch tower arms or Mechazilla, marking the first time an orbital spacecraft has been caught mid-air.

On liftoff of the 124.4-meter-tall vehicle, all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy (or the Starship's first stage, Booster 22) ignited at 22:47:36 UTC. About 2.5 minutes later, hot-staging occured with the upper stage (or Ship 42) igniting its six Raptor engines and separating cleanly from the booster. The mission launched with the goal of recovering both stages.

However, Booster 22 suffered a partial failure during its boostback burn when one engine failed to relight. This resulted in slight underperformance that left the booster low on fuel, forcing the GNC (Guidance, Navigation and Control) system to trigger an automated abort of the catch attempt. Consequently, the the flight termination system(FTS) was triggered, the booster performed a controlled offshore splashdown and exploded in the water 6 minutes 40 seconds after liftoff, preventing the first full two-stage recovery.

While SpaceX previously caught three Super Heavy V1 boosters on Flights 5, 7, and 8, no organization had ever recovered an orbital rocket's upper stage upright at its launch pad. Eliminating heavy landing legs in favor of tower catches maximizes payload capacity and speeds up turnaround times.

"Yes, the green flame is caused by burning copper from depleting fuel in the regenerative cooling circuit and going oxygen-rich (closer to stoichiometric temperature) in the main combustion chamber," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained in an X post Saturday. "Slight underperformance of engines on this flight is the reason. The booster is meant to land with tiny residuals, so the solution is to improve engine performance and performance consistency (underway with Raptor V3.2), as well as adjust flight software to do MECO1 about one second earlier to ensure enough propellant for boostback and landing (tiny change). These early ships and boosters are already outdated by improved designs in production or on the test stand, so this booster loss does not change our timeline to reach high volume, fully reusable Starship flights."

While the booster failed, Ship 42 successfully reached a low Earth orbit(LEO) at an altitude of 275 kilometers. About 34 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft began deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites, completing the payload delivery in about 42 minutes.

Some of those Starlink satellites took video and images of Ship 42's heat shield to check its health for today's landing attempt. Those images, combined with ground-based cameras, found Ship 42 to be in good shape and ready for its big moment.

Each Starlink V3 satellite adds roughly 1 Terabit per second of bandwidth to the network. The 26 satellites deployed on Flight 15 add 26 Tbps of capacity—matching the output of roughly 10 Falcon 9 launches carrying Starlink V2 Mini satellites.

After coasting in orbit for about 22.5 hours, Ship 42 returned to Earth, executed a precise belly-flop maneuver, and was caught by the Mechazilla arms at Starbase on Saturday(Nov. 14). This achievement validates the vehicle's reusability marking the first time the upper stage of a privately-built rocket was recovered.

"That was the missing link," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's landing webcast today, his voice thick with emotion. "That was the holy grail of spaceflight, plummeting through fire to be snatched out of the air by steel. We caught a Starship, and now everything changes."

Many SpaceX employees went outside to watch the Ship 42 descend through the clouds. The space vehicle nestled gently into Mechazilla's waiting arms, while "Baby Come Back" played over SpaceX's landing webcast.

"This is so incredible to see," SpaceX's Jessie Anderson said during the livestream. "One of the most incredible and historic engineering feats of all time has just happened right in front of our eyes."

Recovering both stages is essential for SpaceX to achieve the high launch cadence needed for in-orbit propellant transfer. NASA relies on a lunar lander variant of Starship—which requires multiple orbital tanker refueling flights—for upcoming Artemis moon missions, including Artemis III's planned Earth-orbit docking tests and Artemis IV's lunar landing.

Ship 42 deployed 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 broadband satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) on Flight 14, and it did so again on Flight 15. These 52 spacecraft are the first members of a constellation that will eventually consist of 100,000 satellites, if all goes according to SpaceX's plan.

SpaceX plans to use Starship to build an even bigger network in LEO than the Starlink V3 system — Starmind, an AI data-center constellation that will harbor a million spacecraft, according to Musk. (For context: SpaceX's current-gen Starlink network employs about 11,000 satellites at the moment).

Assembling these megaconstellations will require an incredible launch cadence making the double chopstick catch key to that vision, SpaceX says, to enable quicker inspection, refurbishment and reflight of Starship.

Electron, topped by YAMATSUMI-II (a.k.a. QPS-SAR-19) satellite, lifted off Saturday(Nov. 14), at 0530 UTC, from Launch Complex 1 (LC-1), Mahia Peninsula New Zealand, on the "The Mountain God Rises" mission, completing the 100th launch of the Rocket Lab's rocket, and marking a historic milestone as the fastest commercial rocket to reach triple-digit flights.

The rocket's upper "kick stage" deployed a single iQPS spacecraft 575 kilometers with a 42-degree inclination above Earth. The satellite successfully separated about 50 minutes after liftoff, with iQPS confirming first communications and antenna deployment shortly thereafter.

YAMATSUMI-II is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite built for the Tokyo-based company iQPS, as the company expands its constellation of 36 SAR satellites designed to provide high-resolution Earth imaging through clouds and at night. This was iQPS’s 11th launch with Rocket Lab, with seven additional dedicated Electron launches booked through 2030 to complete the constellation.

Electron achieved 100 launches in less than a decade since its debut in 2017, surpassing previous records for commercially developed rockets.

"It's an unprecedented milestone for a commercial small-lift orbital rocket, and a threshold rarely crossed in modern spaceflight," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said on Monday (Nov. 9), during Rocket Lab's third-quarter earnings call with investors. "But what matters most to us and our customers is that we have achieved a 96% reliability rate across 99 launches."

In the years since, the 18-meter-tall rocket has become one of the most prolific and reliable rockets in the world, carrying small payloads to the final frontier for a variety of customers. SpaceX workhorse, Falcon 9, still dominates the mass-to-orbit by far, launching nearly 85% of the world's payloads to orbit. The Elon Musk company launched the world's most powerful megarocket, Starship, from its Starbase launch site earlier on Friday(Nov. 13)

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO, President, and board member effective immediately, Thursday, following an internal investigation into multiple extramarital affairs and alleged foreign intelligence threats. Jewish CFO Colette Kress has been named interim CEO, while the board appoints a permanent successor.

The departure followed recent reports that Huang had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a Chinese national and executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, whom U.S. intelligence suspects is a Chinese spy. Huang admitted to being "unfaithful to my wife" on November 8, but denied compromising national security.

On Wednesday, reports emerged of two other affairs, one with an unnamed employee, and a second affair with Nvidia VP of Healthcare Kimberly Powell -- who reported directly to him with sources claiming the two were seen being affectionate as recently as March 2026, raising direct corporate governance and conflict-of-interest violations.

The reports prompted the board to accept Huang's resignation late Wednesday, appointed Harvey Jones as its first chair and hired outside counsel Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct an independent investigation.

The scandal triggered significant concern over U.S. security, as Megaspeed allegedly used its relationship with Huang to access 240,000 restricted AI chips banned from export to China, potentially benefiting competitor Huawei.

The FBI is investigating the ties, and Huang has agreed to testify before Congress. President Donald Trump called the news "horrible" and in a Truth Social post Thursday, suggested ex-Apple CEO Tim Cook as a successor.

Nvidia stock dropped as much as 14% on the news before recovering some ground, closing down approximately 4%.

Following Kress's appointment as interim CEO,, social media commentators and viral online posts began questioning whether Huang’s ouster amounted to an "Israeli coup" inside Nvidia. Critics pointed to a July 2023 interview with Israeli business daily Globes, in which Kress noted that her workday typically begins with meetings with Nvidia’s Israeli executives before moving on to California. Others noted that Nvidia’s board is searching for a permanent CEO and speculated that Israeli executives—such as Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan (co-founder of Mellanox) or Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji—could be contenders.

Nvidia’s footprint in Israel dates back to its $6.9 billion acquisition of Israeli networking firm Mellanox in 2020, a deal spearheaded by Huang himself. By 2026, Nvidia employed nearly 6,000 people in Israel (roughly 12% of its global workforce), and its Mellanox-derived networking division generated roughly $40 billion in annual revenue—about 16% of Nvidia's total.

Prior to Nvidia, Kress spent eight years in finance at Texas Instruments, 13 years at Microsoft (including four years as CFO of its Server and Tools division), and three years as a senior finance executive at Cisco. Her first major test arrives on November 17, 2026, when Nvidia is scheduled to report its fiscal third-quarter earnings.