SpaceX catches Starship rocket booster on return to Earth
Starship's Super Heavy booster has made its first landing in Texas.
Screams and cheers erupted in the SpaceX control room as the arms closed around the booster, marking its safe return to Earth.
Cheers and screams erupt in SpaceX's control room as Starship's fifth test succeeds.
For the first time, Elon Musk's company has caught the Super Heavy booster - which sits at the bottom of the two-stage vehicle - as it returns to the launchpad in Texas.
SpaceX in its fifth Starship test flight on Sunday returned the rocket’s towering first stage booster back to its Texas launch pad for the first time using giant metal arms.
It is the latest novel engineering feat in the company’s push to build a reusable moon and Mars vehicle.
Towering almost 121 meters, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise 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. The last one in June was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.
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. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 71-meter booster.
The rocket’s first stage Super Heavy booster lifted off at 12.25pm GMT from SpaceX’s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, sending the Starship second stage rocket towards space before separating at an altitude of about 70km and returning to land.
The Super Heavy booster relit three of its 33 Raptor engines to slow its speedy descent back to SpaceX’s launch site, as it targeted the launch tower it had blasted off from. The tower is fitted with two large metal arms, called “Mechazilla” by CEO Elon Musk.
With its engines roaring, the 71m-tall Super Heavy booster fell into the launch tower’s arms, hooking itself in place by the four forward grid fins it used to steer itself through the air.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk wrote on X after the catch.
The novel catch-landing method is the latest advance in SpaceX’s test-to-failure development campaign for a fully reusable rocket designed to loft more cargo into orbit, ferry humans to the moon for Nasa and eventually reach Mars — the ultimate destination envisioned by Musk.
The US Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday approved SpaceX’s launch licence for the Starship test, following weeks of tension between the company and the regulator over the pace of launch approvals and fines related to SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9.
Starship, first unveiled by Musk in 2017, has exploded several times in various stages of testing on past flights, but successfully completed a full flight in June for the first time.
The two-stage rocket’s Super Heavy booster lifted off from Texas, sending the Starship on a near-orbital path bound for the Indian Ocean about 90 minutes later.
Being able to land the booster safely increases its chances of being rapidly reusable, which would reduce the costs of spacefaring.
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