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.
Elon Musk's company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas.
The rocket's “super heavy” booster landed in the arms of the company's launch tower in a dramatic capture.
“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Hutt said on the company's webcast.
“What we just saw looked like magic,” Hutt added.
The spacecraft separated and continued into space, aiming to travel halfway around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and dispersing into the Indian Ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued SpaceX a license to launch Starship's fifth flight, the regulator is earlier than previously estimated.
There are no people on the fifth flight of the starship.
SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system in four spaceflight tests so far in April and November last year, as well as this March and June. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last.
The company's rocket successfully completed a flight test for the first time during its June flight, when the craft crashed into the Indian Ocean after surviving the intense force of atmospheric reentry. Additionally, the rocket booster returned in one piece to make a controlled fall into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is intended to be a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also important to NASA's plans 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 says SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before launching any manned rockets.
SpaceX insists it tries to leverage “what we learned from previous flights” in its approach to building giant rockets.
But the company wanted to launch a fifth flight before October, which led both SpaceX and Musk to criticize the FAA, saying “additional environmental analysis” was delaying the process.
The FAA and partner agencies from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Commerce's National Marine Fisheries Service conducted the assessment faster than expected, as did SpaceX. pay a fine to environmental regulators over unauthorized discharge of water at its launch site in Texas.
With the capture of the booster, SpaceX passed the fourth test flight milestone.
The company fulfilled its objective of returning the booster to the launch site and using the turret's “stick” weapon to grab the vehicle. The company sees the ambitious capture method as crucial to making the rocket fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers spent years preparing and months testing the booster capture effort, with technicians dedicating thousands of hours to building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.
Capture requires compliance with thousands of criteria, the agency said. If it had not been ready, the booster would have deviated from the return trajectory instead of hitting the Gulf of Mexico coast.
“We will not compromise ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and will only attempt to return if the situation warrants,” SpaceX said.
Starship is the longest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on super-heavy boosters, the craft is 397 feet long and nearly 30 feet in diameter.
The 232-foot-long Super Heavy Booster launches the rocket into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust – double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA's Space Launch System rocket. First released in 2022.
The 50-meter-long craft itself has six Raptor engines – three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three for operating in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
