SpaceX has pulled off its boldest test flight yet of the enormous Starship rocket, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms.
Towering almost 121 metres, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise (late at night AEDT) on Sunday from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea.
This time, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk upped the challenge and risk. The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier.
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The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 71-metre booster.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk announced via X.
“Science fiction without the fiction part.”
Company employees screamed in joy, jumping and pumping their fists into the air as the booster slowly lowered itself into the launch tower’s arms.
“Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot observed from near the launch site.
“I am shaking right now.”
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“Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
An hour later, the empty spacecraft that was launched atop the booster made a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean as planned, adding to the day’s success.
It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing.
SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.
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The retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world once it was free of the booster. Cameras on a buoy in the Indian Ocean showed flames shooting up from the water as the booster impacted precisely at the targeted spot. It was not meant to be recovered for this demonstration.
“What a day,” Huot said.
“Let’s get ready for the next one.”
Before this, the last launch in June was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.
But even it came up short at the end after pieces came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.
SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon Nine rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads — not on them.
Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.
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