SpaceX launched its huge Starship for the first time and then brought the booster back to the launch site and caught it with a pair of big “chopsticks.”
The company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas was the site of this test flight, which was the fifth in the Starship progress program. The almost 400-foot-tall Starship is the center of SpaceX’s stated goal to bring life to other planets and, more quickly, NASA’s Artemis campaign to bring people back to the moon’s surface.
SpaceX wants to quickly reuse the whole Starship vehicle, which is made up of an upper stage (also called Starship) and a Super Heavy booster. To do this, they need to show that they can quickly collect both stages and fix them up for future flights.
So it makes sense that the main goals of this fifth flight test were to try to “catch” the Super Heavy booster at the launch site for the first time and have the Starship reenter the atmosphere and splash down in the Indian Ocean as planned.
The second goal had already been met: during the last test mission in June, SpaceX successfully controlled the back-up and splashdown of the Starship upper stage. The company said in a blog post that the booster catch would be “singularly novel” in the history of rocketry.
Falcon 9 booster launches on self-driving barges and land-based landing zones are the most similar thing. For today’s launch, the rocket slowed down until it was hovering and carefully placed itself between two “chopstick” arms on the launch tower. Then, those arms closed around the rocket and kept it in place when its engines stopped working.
The catch can be seen about 40 minutes into SpaceX’s test movie. After the booster came off and was caught, Starship continued to rise into orbit. It then sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean and exploded, as SpaceX had not planned to collect it.
In a website update, SpaceX said that “thousands” of conditions had to be met to show that all the systems on the vehicle and the pad were healthy for the catch try to happen. The Federal Aviation Administration had said earlier that it wouldn’t be giving out a modified launch license for this test until late November, so the test also happened a little earlier than planned.
SpaceX was very upset about that deadline, which is why the company kept criticizing what it saw as the regulator’s lack of efficiency. The FAA said on Saturday, though, that the launch was okay.
In a statement, the FAA said, “SpaceX met all safety, environmental, and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight.” In addition to the permission for the first flight, the FAA said that the changes asked for by SpaceX for Flight 6 were within the scope of what had already been looked at.
SpaceX engineers have been very busy while they wait for this launch license. In the past few months, they have tested the launch tower many times, replaced the rocket’s thermal protection system with newer tiles and a backup ablative layer, and made changes to the ship’s software for reentry. This week, engineers finished tests of the fuel loading system and the water deluge system on the launch pad. The water deluge system is meant to protect the pad from the 33 powerful Raptor engines on the booster.
The company wants to bring the Starship upper stage back to the landing spot in the future, but we won’t know for sure until they do that in a test launch.
“Each flight builds on what was learned in the previous one, testing new hardware and operations in every part of Starship. We’re almost ready to show techniques that are fundamental to Starship’s fully and quickly reusable design,” the company says. “We’ll quickly become able to use Starship and change the way people can get to space by continuing to test our hardware in flight as often and safely as possible.”
Also Read: Another Company Doesn’t Like That Spacex Wants to Launch Up to 120 Times a Year From Florida
This story, which has been updated to include the successful test flight, was helped by Anthony Ha.
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