For the first time, SpaceX not only launched its gigantic Starship, but also returned the booster to the launch site and caught it with a pair of oversized “chopsticks.”
This test flight, the fifth in the Starship development program, took place Sunday morning at the company’s Starbase site in southeast Texas. The nearly 400-foot-tall Starship is the centerpiece of SpaceX’s stated ambition to make life multiplanetary, but more immediately of NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the surface of the moon.
SpaceX envisions rapid reuse of the entire Starship vehicle, which includes an upper stage (also called Starship) and a super-heavy booster, but that means demonstrating the ability to recover both stages and quickly refit them for future flights.
Therefore, it makes sense that the main objectives of this fifth flight test were twofold: attempting the first “capture” of the Super Heavy booster at the launch site and a re-entry and landing of Starship at the target in the Indian Ocean.
This last goal had already been achieved: SpaceX achieved a controlled re-entry and splashdown of Starship’s upper stage during the last test mission in June. But propellant capture, as the company put it in a blog post, would be “uniquely novel” in rocket history.
The closest analogue is the now common landings of Falcon 9 boosters on autonomous barges and land landing zones. In today’s launch, the booster decelerated to a hover and gently positioned itself within the area of two “stick” arms attached to the launch tower. Those arms then closed around the booster and held it aloft after its engines stopped working.
You can see the capture around 40 minutes later SpaceX test video. Following detachment and seizure of the booster, Starship continued to ascend to orbit before splashing into the Indian Ocean and exploding (SpaceX had not planned to recover the spacecraft).
SpaceX noted in an update posted to their website that “thousands” of criteria showing healthy systems throughout the vehicle and platform had to be met for the capture attempt to occur. This test also took place a little earlier than expected: the Federal Aviation Administration had previously said that it did not anticipate issuing a modified launch license for this test before the end of November.
That schedule greatly upset SpaceX, prompting the company to repeatedly denounce what it characterized as the regulator’s inefficiency. But the FAA announced Saturday that it had approved the launch.
“The FAA determined that SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other requirements for the suborbital test flight,” the regulator said in a statement. It should be noted that the authorization also includes approval for the next test flight, given that “the changes requested by SpaceX for flight 6 are within the scope of what was previously analyzed,” the FAA said.
While waiting for this launch license, SpaceX engineers have been very busy: in recent months, they have conducted numerous tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket’s entire thermal protection system with newer tiles and a backup ablative layer, and updated the ship’s software for reentry. This week, engineers completed propellant loading tests and tests of the launch pad’s water deluge system, which is intended to protect the pad from the powerful fire of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines.
The company also eventually plans to bring Starship’s upper stage to the landing site, although we’ll have to wait to see that in future test launches.
“With each flight building on learnings from the last, testing hardware and operational improvements across all facets of Starship, we are poised to demonstrate techniques critical to Starship’s fully and rapidly reusable design,” the company says. “By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we will quickly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space.”
Anthony Ha contributed to this report, which has been updated to reflect the successful test flight.