The fifth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship featured something never before seen in decades of rocketry: The first stage not only made a controlled landing but literally returned to the embrace of its launch tower.
Just under seven minutes after Starship lifted off at 7:25 a.m. Central time from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, Starbase facility, the descending booster angled itself toward the tower as three of its 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines slowed its flight. Then it pivoted upright, the massive “chopsticks” arms of the tower swung inwards to clutch the stage, and the booster’s grid fins settled atop the assembly that SpaceX also refers to as “Mechazilla.”
SpaceX has been successfully landing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters on landing pads and on barges since December 2015, but Sunday’s landing required far more precision and was much riskier.
The usual outcome of an uncontrolled booster’s return to its pad is the rocket blowing up and taking out its own launch infrastructure. See, for example, the July 1969 explosion of the Soviet Union’s doomed N1 moon rocket or the October 2014 failure of an Antares rocket at NASA’s Wallops Island, Virginia, facility.
“We got it!” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot announced to viewers of the company’s livestream on X. “I am, like, shaking right now.”
SpaceX opted for this challenging approach to enable quicker reuse of Starship boosters than what it manages with Falcon-series boosters today.
The rest of Sunday’s test flight showed further progress in SpaceX’s Starship development. Its second stage flew to a suborbital trajectory most of the way around the world, survived a fiery reentry—albeit with damage visible to one of its fins in video streamed via Starlink—and then performed a controlled splashdown into the Indian Ocean. Seconds later, the upper stage exploded, a moment caught by a buoy SpaceX had left near the planned landing spot.
Starship going up, before part of it came down right back to where it started. (Credit: Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)
Starship flights began on a less auspicious note last spring. The vehicle’s April 20, 2023, debut featured multiple engine failures on the rocket’s first stage, followed by the rocket tumbling out of control and exploding 24 miles up.
Starship’s Nov. 18, 2023, second flight got the rocket through a tricky hot-staging sequence in which some of its second-stage engines lit before jettisoning the first stage, venting their exhaust through gaps in an interstage ring. But the first stage blew up shortly after, while the second stage suffered its own “rapid unscheduled disassembly” just before its engines should have cut out.
Flight three, staged on March 14, featured the first stage completing its mission and making its way almost all the way back to the Gulf of Mexico before exploding just above the water. The upper stage, meanwhile, flew a suborbital trajectory but did not survive the heating of reentry, with telemetry ending with the vehicle about 40 miles up.
Starship’s fourth flight, performed June 6, looked like it might feature a similar fiery end for the upper stage; viewers could see parts of its fins flying off. But that spacecraft instead reached the surface of the Indian Ocean structurally intact, if more than a little cooked. The booster, meanwhile, conducted its own splashdown in the Gulf; last month, SpaceX recovered part of its outer ring of engines.
Sunday’s launch followed weeks of squabbling as SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk slammed federal environmental and transportation regulators for not approving its launch plans fast enough. Launches for NASA and the Defense Department constitute a large chunk of SpaceX’s business, but the government also has yet to secure an alternative to SpaceX for such essential missions as transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
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Starship itself is in NASA’s critical path for the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon. In 2021, the space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to build a version of Starship to take crew from NASA’s much smaller Orion capsule down to the lunar surface and then back up to lunar orbit; two years later, NASA picked Blue Origin to construct a second lunar lander for later Artemis missions.
SpaceX has much more work to do to fulfill its Artemis ambitions. First, it has to get Starship into Earth orbit, but it also has to demonstrate that one Starship can refuel another in space. That will require not just more successful launches like Sunday’s but the ability to conduct them in rapid succession.
Musk gave his enormous audience a break from posting conspiracy lies about illegal immigrants and amplifying other people’s disinformation to pronounce Sunday’s test a major accomplishment toward one of his most frequently stated goals: “Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” he tweeted.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, meanwhile, posted his congratulations on X later Sunday morning, writing that “As we prepare to go back to the Moon under #Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead—spincluding to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars.”
Musk promptly replied without any of his recent vitriol over government overreach: “Thank you, sir! Looking forward to serving NASA in returning humanity to the Moon.”
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About Rob Pegoraro
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