SpaceX launched the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made a dramatic first capture of the rocket’s 20-story-tall booster.
The achievement marks a major milestone toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.
Elon Musk’s company launched the Starship at 8:25 am. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to landing on the company’s launch tower arms nearly seven minutes after launch.
“Are you kidding me? SpaceX communications director Dan Huot said on the company’s webcast.
“What we just saw looked magical,” Huot added.
The Super Heavy booster lands on the company’s launch tower during Starship’s fifth flight on October 13, 2024.
SpaceX
Astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew into space three times, congratulated SpaceX at a position on social media.
“There has been a huge step forward in human capabilities today. It makes me even more excited for our collective future,” Hadfield wrote.
The spacecraft separated and continued into space, aiming to travel halfway around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and blasting off into the Indian Ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration gave SpaceX permission to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday, earlier than the regulator had previously estimated.
There are no people on the fifth flight of the Starship.
SpaceX has flown the complete Starship rocket system on four spaceflight tests so far, with launches in April and November last year, as well as this March and June. Each test flight has achieved more milestones than the last.
The company’s rocket successfully completed a flight test for the first time during the June flight, as the Starship plunged into the Indian Ocean after surviving the intense forces of atmospheric re-entry. Additionally, the missile booster returns in one piece to make a controlled meltdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The SpaceX Starship sits on a launch pad at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, on October 12, 2024, ahead of the Starship Flight 5 test. The test will involve returning the Starship’s Super Heavy Booster to the launch site.
Sergio Flores | Afp | Getty Images
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
Company leadership said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
SpaceX stresses that it is trying to build “on what we learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing the massive rocket.
But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight earlier than October, prompting both SpaceX and Musk to strongly criticize the FAA, saying “unnecessary environmental analysis” was holding up the process.
While the FAA and partner agencies at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments faster than expected, SpaceX also had to pay fines to environmental regulators regarding unauthorized water discharges at its launch site in Texas.
Targets for fifth flight
The SpaceX Starship is seen on the launch pad ahead of its third flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas on March 12, 2024.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
With the booster catch, SpaceX has surpassed the milestones of the fourth test flight.
The company completed its goal of returning the booster back to the launch site and used the “chopstick” arms on the tower to grab the vehicle. The company sees the ambitious catch approach as critical to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing the recapture effort, with technicians devoting tens of thousands of hours to creating the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.
Catches require thousands of criteria to be met, the company said. If it wasn’t ready, the booster would have been diverted from the return trajectory to launch off the coast into the Gulf of Mexico.
“We accept no compromises in ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only be attempted if conditions are right,” SpaceX said.
The rocket
Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Heavy booster, the Starship is 397 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, which is 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust — about twice the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which first launched in 2022.
The 165-foot-tall Starship itself has six Raptor engines — three for use in Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The complete system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.