SpaceX Starship rocket launch: Flight 5 catches booster

SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made a spectacular first capture of the rocket’s more than 20-story booster.

This achievement marks a major step toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.

Elon Musk’s company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to land on the arms of the company’s launch tower nearly seven minutes after launch.

“Are you kidding me?” said Dan Huot, SpaceX’s director of communications, during the company’s webcast.

“What we just saw looked like magic,” added Huot.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a job on social networks.

“As we prepare to return to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead,” Nelson wrote.

The craft separated and continued toward space, traveling halfway around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and crashing into the Indian Ocean as planned to complete the test.

There was no one on board the fifth Starship flight. Company management said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.

The full Starship system has already completed four spaceflight tests, with launches in April and November last year, as well as in March and June. Each of the test flights completed more stages than the previous one.

SpaceX emphasizes that it is trying to build “on what we have learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing the massive rocket.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of transporting goods and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also essential 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 lunar program.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued SpaceX a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight, earlier than the regulator had estimated. But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight before October, leading SpaceX and Musk to sharply criticize the FAA, saying “superfluous environmental analysis” was delaying the process.

While the FAA and partner agencies at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service conducted assessments more quickly than expected, SpaceX also had to pay fines to environmental regulators regarding unauthorized water releases at its Texas launch site.

With the booster catch, SpaceX has passed the stages of the fourth test flight.

The company achieved its goal of returning the booster to the launch site and used the “wand” arms on the tower to catch the vehicle. The company sees the ambitious capture approach as essential to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.

“SpaceX engineers spent years preparing and months testing the booster capture attempt, with technicians devoting tens of thousands of hours to building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” wrote the company on its website.

Capture requires meeting thousands of criteria, the company said. Had it not been ready, the booster would have veered off its return trajectory and crashed off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

“We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and return will only be attempted if conditions are right,” SpaceX said.

The Super Heavy booster, which stands 232 feet tall, is the starting point of the rocket’s journey to space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which launched for the first time in 2022.